Novell Unveils Virtual Environments Manager

Novell Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL) has rolled out a lower-end management system to help IT shops manage both multiple virtual machines and physical resources including Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT)'s Hyper-V, VMware ESX, and Xen integrated into SUSE Linux Enterprise.

PlateSpin Orchestrate 2.0, formerly called Novell ZENworks Orchestrator, allows for control of multiple virtual environments from a single interface. The new release reportedly cuts down on time and costs associated with data center admins having to learn several management tools.

Longer term, the software helps lower costs because IT shops can build foundation software for next generation applications that can sit atop existing IT infrastructure, they said.

"This helps [IT managers] mitigate risk through the automation of manual processes, which can be error-prone, and cut down on complexity by controlling virtual machine sprawl," said Joe Wagner, senior VP and general manager of systems and resource management at Novell. "More importantly, given today's economic climate, it can help reduce by costs by leveraging open source virtualization."

Besides juggling multiple virtual environments, another new core feature includes LDAP support that supplies tight integration with user a number of user directories.Another core improvement includes changes made to the product's graphical interface. These improvements are intended to simplify the manual VM management of the infrastructures across hypervisors from competing vendors.

Novell officials said they have also made other improvements include significant improvements to the products scalability, according to company officials, who said it can now service hundreds of VM hosts.

InformationWeek Analytics has published an independent analysis of the challenges around virtualization management. Download the report here