Article

(View Disclaimer)

With the acquisition of PlateSpin, Novell will offer a full solution stack with a powerful virtualization platform and a best-in-class heterogeneous management solution. From operating system support for Linux, Windows and UNIX, to virtual platforms from the leading vendors, to blade servers and rack servers and desktops – PlateSpin truly takes a heterogeneous approach to workload lifecycle management. Together, Novell and PlateSpin will solve many of the data center challenges that you face today under four fundamental workload lifecycle management categories – Relocation, Protection, Provisioning and Optimization.

Relocation: PlateSpin provides a completely integrated product suite that automates the assessment and migration phases of data center initiatives, like server consolidation, data center relocation and hardware upgrades, to help you reduce costs, power consumption and space in the data center.

• Server Consolidation: With Virtualization from Novell, customers can consolidate applications from multiple under-used servers onto one powerful server. PlateSpin provides the only completely integrated product suite that automates the assessment and consolidation phases of the project from start to finish. Organizations can remotely measure server assets and workload resource utilization trends to identify ideal candidates for consolidation. Consolidation scenarios based on multi-dimensional, multi-site data can be created to ensure the consolidation initiative is optimized. Scenarios created can be automatically executed by streaming server workloads onto bare-metal or virtual platforms and right-sizing host environments on-the-fly. Dramatically accelerate server consolidation and virtualization projects from years to weeks by completely automating the measurement, analysis, capacity planning and movement of thousands of servers into virtual environments.
• Hardware Lease Migration and Data Center Relocation: Automatically and remotely streams server workloads across dissimilar hardware platforms over the network for lease migration and hardware upgrades. Network-based physical-to-physical workload streaming eliminates the need to manually re-install operating systems, patches, data, and applications to new servers and dramatically shortens downtime. Remotely drag-and-drop servers across multi-architecture data centers around the world, removing the need to send hardware and valuable IT staff to various locations, saving time, money and resources.

Protection: PlateSpin's disaster recovery solutions offer affordable workload protection that leverages virtualization technology to protect both physical and virtual servers in the data center, for improved security and business continuity.

• Disaster Recovery: From flexible image recovery to consolidated recovery, PlateSpin’s disaster recovery solutions offer an affordable server protection alternative that leverages the power of virtualization technology. Data centers are able to replicate a whole server image by streaming it over the network to an available virtual machine host allocated as a warm standby system. Live transfer functionality enables incremental synchronization to occur at user-defined intervals to maintain currency between the production environment and the virtual standby system. In the event of a primary server outage, the standby system can be activated to take over the workload immediately while the production server is restored. After recovery, the system can be moved back to a physical server of dissimilar hardware or moved to a production virtual machine server for continued operation in a virtual machine. Additionally, data centers are able to leverage rapid restoration capabilities to run test failure scenarios which were previously too time consuming for all but the most mission-critical server assets.

Provisioning: Using PlateSpin's technologies, you will have a single approach to imaging and configuring physical and virtual workloads regardless of platform. This eliminates the manual install process and dramatically reduces the time to provision new server workloads. It will also enable you to address changing resource requirements at peak demand times as well as in test lab scenarios.

• Server Provisioning: Automatically provisions physical servers and virtual machines over the network, accelerating server setup and deployment. Remotely captures an entire server image, which can be stored in any standard server or storage area network. Leverage existing image or backup libraries from Acronis®, Symantec®, IBM®, and CA® at any time to any number of bare-metal physical or virtual platforms, regardless of hardware configuration. Completely automate the process of provisioning and configuring operating systems, data, and applications to dissimilar platforms, eliminating manual install process and dramatically reducing time to provision new server workloads.
• Test Lab: Automatically creates physical or virtual test labs by streaming servers over the network from a production environment. Organizations can replicate production servers to asymmetric environments such as blade servers and virtual platforms, without needing to re-install operating systems, data and applications. Create libraries of test images, which can be deployed to physical or virtual machines automatically. Drag-and-drop new applications back into production and accelerate the round-trip migration of test, development, and production systems. Reduce cycle time and eliminate the errors associated with reproducing test and production environments.

Optimization and Management: Novell and PlateSpin optimize the balance between physical and virtual infrastructure by automatically monitoring and making infrastructure adjustments based on server availability and workload demand. By automating the process and increasing the visibility into how workloads use physical and virtual resources over time, you can increase server utilization and optimize your data center by better addressing common workload movement challenges.

• Workload Optimization: Optimizes the balance between physical and virtual infrastructures through ongoing workload monitoring and the automatic consolidation, de-consolidation, and free movement of server workloads throughout the network. Analyzes selected servers and stream them across the network to the most appropriate physical or virtual infrastructure based on server resource supply and application workload demand. Ensure that servers are continually allocated to the most appropriate infrastructure, maximizing performance for the most demanding applications while minimizing hardware costs. By increasing visibility into how workloads use available physical and virtual resources over time, organizations can better address common workload movement challenges and optimize the data center.

Product Set

The Novell and PlateSpin product set will include:

Novell ZENworks® Orchestrator: As the "brain" of the data center automation system, Novell ZENworks Orchestrator allows your administrators to manage physical and virtual resources in heterogeneous IT environments. It can also be extended with management packs that provide additional functionality.

Novell ZENworks Virtual Machine Management: With Novell ZENworks Virtual Machine Management, you can discover servers for virtual machine commissioning; find offline and online virtual machines; deploy, re-deploy and roll back virtual machines; and manage physical, virtual and storage compute nodes.

PlateSpin PowerRecon: PowerRecon is software that monitors, analyses and determines the optimal fit between server resource supply and workload demand. By remotely capturing server inventory, resource capacity and workload demand statistics, PowerRecon ensures that the right server infrastructure has been matched to the right application workload to maximize performance, while minimizing hardware cost. Build optimized, actionable plans for capacity planning, server consolidation, and disaster recovery projects.

PlateSpin PowerConvert: PowerConvert is a software product that allows server workloads to be streamed between physical servers, blade infrastructures, virtual machines, and image archives over the network. PlateSpin’s workload portability technology is the first and only solution that decouples data, applications and operating systems from servers, re-configures and optimizes resources, and automatically streams workloads to any physical or virtual platform. Move, copy or replicate server workloads for one-time relocation projects, hardware-independent provisioning, innovative disaster recovery solutions or ongoing optimization.

PlateSpin Forge: PlateSpin Forge is a consolidated recovery hardware appliance that protects both physical and virtual server workloads using embedded virtualization technology. In the event of a production server outage or disaster, workloads can be rapidly powered on in the PlateSpin Forge recovery environment and continue to run as normal until the production environment is restored. The PlateSpin Forge appliance ships with prepackaged storage, consolidated recovery software and virtualization technology that is ready to go out-of-the-box.

SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the best platform for mission-critical workloads in your data center. It includes the Xen* hypervisor, an open source virtual machine (VM) monitor that coordinates low-level interactions between virtual machines and physical hardware. When you run your physical server on the latest x86-based processors from Intel* (Intel VT*) or AMD* (AMD-V*), you can take advantage of the benefits of Xen 3.0, which supports both paravirtualized and fully virtualized VMs.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Virtual Machine Driver Pack: This paravirtualized driver pack strengthens connectivity between guest operating systems and the underlying hypervisor. It uses additional channels of communication that improve performance and allow virtualized guests, such as Windows, to achieve powerful, near-native performance levels.

Get more information here >

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.