Novell Tuesday unveiled desktop and data center management products designed to tackle heterogeneous virtual, physical and clustered server environments.

The company introduced three new products and one upgraded product that Novell representatives say will help enterprise IT managers manage multiple client and server platforms.

"Novell is introducing a cross-platform interoperable solution designed to maximize physical and virtual resources," said Joe Wagner, Novell general manager of systems and resource management, on a company press conference call.

To start, Novell debuted its ZENworks Orchestrator product, which enables policy-based automation among managed resources. The software can learn systems performance and resource allocations to better predict demand, Novell says.

Also new to the ZENworks management platform is Virtual Machine Management, which lets customers deploy and manage virtualization technologies from vendors such as VMware and Microsoft, as well as the Xen hypervisor open-source server virtualization software. Virtual Machine Management can also manage virtualized environments in Novell Open Enterprise Server. It runs on Windows, Unix and Linux systems to manage virtual data center assets and provision workloads based on pre-defined policies.

Competitors CA, Opsware and IBM have rolled out similar tools in recent weeks for managing virtual resources.

Novell’s third new product, ZENworks HPC (High Performance Computing) Management, helps customers perform grid-based management of Java applications and distribute workloads across parallel systems. Multicast data distribution capabilities let users move and copy large volumes of data to remote resources for processing, according to Novell.

Lastly, Novell updated its ZENworks Asset Management software to Version 7.5. With this release, Novell added readiness reports for Windows Vista and Novell’s SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. The software provides asset inventory, software usage and license reconciliation capabilities for both Windows and Linux desktops.

ZENworks 7.5 Asset Management is available now and priced at $33 per managed device or user. The three new products are scheduled to be available in December from Novell and through Novell partners, integrators and service providers later in 2007. Novell will release pricing for the new products when they ship.