Novell trailed into the market for managing virtual machine and grid computing systems in the data center on Nov. 28 when it launched four new ZENworks offerings.
At the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas, Novell introduced its first products designed to manage heterogeneous virtual machine and grid computing environments to help reduce the cost and complexity of maintaining data centers with multiple vendors’ offerings.
The four new ZENworks management tools closely follow the launch of new heterogeneous virtual machine and server cluster management products from CA, IBM, Opsware and Egenera.
Three brand new ZENworks tools work together to manage virtual machine deployments, balance workloads across heterogeneous virtual machines, schedule jobs and automatically provision or deprovision resources based on past behavior.
At the core of the new offerings is the Novell ZENworks Orchestrator, which automatically enforces policies for provisioning resources on demand.
The Orchestrator continuously monitors the performance of virtual machine environments and learns behaviors to be able to optimize resource allocation.
“Say a job is defined with a set of performance requirements. We’ll monitor that job and determine whether it’s been over- or under-provisioned and determine where the best place is to run that job,” said Alan Murray, vice president of product management at Novell in Waltham, Mass.
“If we recognize a task continues to get spun out at the end of the quarter and more equipment needs to be provisioned then, we’ll learn that and start to pre-provision to make that resource available earlier. It’s a constant monitoring and refinement to get the best optimization of the job,” he said.
The new Novell ZENworks Virtual Machine Management tool automates deployment and management of virtual machines in the data center, and it dynamically provisions workloads. It manages virtual servers from Xen, VMware, Microsoft and Novell’s own Open Enterprise Server.
Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Novell Joins Growing VM Management Chorus.
