During my college days you always had to be careful when using materials, which came from an external source, in any course work. Forget to include these in the References section of your paper and you would be marked down; worse case could be an accusation of plagiarism. This memory of college was recently triggered by a PR release from another company who is active in the virtualization market.

To see why take a look at this photo taken on 25th November 2007 of the Novell booth at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas. Apologies for the size but you need to see the messages on booth wall.







During the event we spoke to many people who wanted to know more about our virtualization solutions for data center automation which ZENworks Orchestrator Server ( ZOS ) provides.

For those who haven't come across ZOS before, here's a scenario to illustrate what it can do for you. It's end of quarter. The finance servers are busy crunching their way through the numbers to produce reports showing how well the company has been performing. Naturally, management wants these are soon as possible; sales definitively does as commission payments are also being calculated. ZOS moves virtual machines around physical hosts so that those associated with the finance system has access to more resources, speeding up processing. ZOS could also have taken the action of creating a new VM from the master library, then provisioned it with the finance application and brought into play on the most appropriate host hardware. It all depends on the rules that you describe to ZOS which are based on how you operate your data centre.

ZOS works wth VMware, Xen and the soon to be release Microsoft offering, HyperX. Read more on ZOS here.

We summarize the functionality of ZOS using an equation type notation in the form of Optimization = Virtualization Automation

Now getting back to my college memory, the other company used Virtualization Automation = Optimization as slogan in the press release. It's always nice to be referenced like this; its quite flattering.

But an acknowledgment would be nice...