Quoting Computer Business Review

Novell Inc has expanded its ZENworks systems management capabilities with automation, virtual machine management and high performance compute cluster management capabilities.

The Waltham, Massachusetts-based company is best known for its Linux and identity management offerings, but also offers ZENworks for NetWare, Linux and Windows systems management.

The patent peace element of Novell's recent agreement with Microsoft Corp might have proved controversial but the company was eager to talk up the benefits of the interoperability side of the deal.

"Following our joint agreement with Microsoft earlier this month, Novell is now delivering the first cross-platform interoperable solution to address customers' systems management needs to maximize both physical and virtual resources," commented Joe Wagner, Novell general manager of systems and resource management.

The Microsoft interoperability is particularly evident in ZENworks Virtual Machine Management and version 7.5 of ZENworks Asset Management, while the other new products launched were ZENworks Orchestrator and ZENworks HPC Management.

"Orchestrator... is the brains of the system," explained Wagner. "It automatically enforces policies to dynamically manage, maintain, and deploy IT resources based on user and resource identities."

Meanwhile Virtual Machine Management "integrates to the ZENworks Orchestrator and is the only heterogeneous virtual machine management technology on the market that includes support out of the box for Xen, Microsoft and VMware virtual machines.

The new technologies have all been developed by Novell in-house, according to Wagner, and also boast HPC Management for the management of Java applications over HPC cluster grids, and an update to Asset Management that makes it "the only product on the market today that runs readiness reports for both Microsoft Vista and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10.

Read or comment on the original, here.