There's a general consensus amongst virtualisation vendors that the core technology needed to support virtual machines will, eventually, be incorporated into server and PC hardware.

As such, there's an increasing emphasis on products to manage and balance virtual workloads, with Novell the latest to show its hand following the acquisition of PlateSpin, a leader in what it calls “workload lifecycle management.”

Best known for products such as PowerConvert, PlateSpin has carved out its own niche market with software to enable physical servers to be converted into a variety of virtual machine formats and for virtual machines to be migrated between platforms. These are tools which Novell will continue to sell alongside its own ZENworks Orchestrator, which enables virtual workloads to be centrally managed, inventoried, categorised and provisioned.

The PlateSpin acquisition will also add to the virtualisation facilities available in Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise platform, the next release of which, previewed at the recent Novell BrainShare conference, will focus on mission-critical data centre technologies, virtualisation and interoperability.

Importantly, too, although PlateSpin is to become part of the Novell Systems and Resource Management business unit, there are no plans to change its product set, platform independence or development roadmap.