Yesterday Novell announced the upcoming availability of three new major release from its PlateSpin division: Migrate 9.0, Protect 10.0 and Forge 3.0.
All three products have in common the same physical to virtual (P2V) migration engine originally developed by PlateSpin and formerly called PowerConvert.
Over time, PlateSpin first and Novell then, forked it in three different tools to serve different use cases.
The new wave of releases introduces support for Linux guest operating systems, which is available for P2V, V2V and P2P migrations.
In details, this means that PlateSpin Migrate now can apply its Live Transfer and Live Server Sync technologies to Linux workloads. Novell introduces the two new features almost one year ago with Migrate 8.1.
PlateSpin Migrate 9 also supports the migration of Windows Clusters between physical and virtual infrastructures.
PlateSpin Protect 10 (we are not sure if or when Protect 9 has been released) introduces a new, unified disaster recovery plan for all server workloads, whether physical or virtual, running both Windows and Linux, and a redesigned web user interface.
Last but not least, the Forge 3.0 physical appliances, besides the support for Linux workloads, now come with increased memory and storage capacity, a new smart replication technology, support for Windows Clusters protection and APIs.
The three products are expected to be available within the end of June.
Update: Novell has been kind enough to share additional information about the products above, so virtualization.info is able to add three key details:
- the Linux guest operating systems supported across the product line will be SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 and 11, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4.x and 5.x.
- The new PlateSpin Forge physical appliances now feature Intel Xeon 5600 CPUs, 32GB RAM, 3.5TB HD, and the platforms ships with an integrated software iSCSI initiator.
- While the price of PlateSpin Forge remains unchanged, both Protect and Migrate have new prices: Protect 10 starts at $1,495 per protected workload (including one year premium support) and Migrate 9 starts at $295 per protected workload (including one year premium support).
Additionally, Novell informs that indeed Protect 9 doesn’t exist. They decided to skip one release version moving from 8.1 to 10.