With a surprising announcement Novell unveiled its plans to enter the application virtualization market yesterday.
The company signed an OEM agreement with a small firm called XenoCode, which recently reshaped its technology to deliver application virtualization.
Novell already rebranded the XenoCode Application Studio as ZENworks Application Virtualization (ZAV), offering it at $39 per concurrent user.
With this move Novell confirms its strong commitment on virtualization.
Novell already has its own hypervisor, the Xen implementation embedded in SUSE Enterprise Linux 10, but it’s also planning a second virtualization platform featuring just the hypervisor.
On the management side its ZENworks Orchestrator acts as hypervisor console, VM lifecycle management and virtual infrastructure orchestrator.
Last but not least, at the beginning of the year Novell acquired PlateSpin granting itself P2V migration and capacity planning capabilities that should be integrated in the ZENWorks family by the end of this year.