Novell is repositioning the virtualization widgetry that it bought for $205 million this spring when it bought PlateSpin and now claims to be the only kid on the block who can support 32- and 64-bit Windows and Linux servers, as well as all the leading hypervisors.

It ticks off Citrix’ XenServer, Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Virtual Server, VMware’s ESX and ESXi and the Xen integrated in its own SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Known collectively as PlateSpin Workload Management, the new-style PlateSpin Recon, Migrate, Protect and Orchestrate products enable customers to profile, migrate, protect and manage server workloads between physical and virtual infrastructures in heterogeneous IT environments.

Novell, which has Microsoft in its corner for interoperability, figures it’s strengthened its cross-platform position vis-à-vis the increasing ubiquitous mixed data center, which uses different hardware platforms, operating systems and virtualization technologies that erase the boundaries between physical and virtual machines with portable workloads.

PlateSpin Workload Management is supposed to enable data center administrators to optimize the distribution of these workloads to provide the best performance for users and applications across both physical and virtual machines – all terribly next generation and holistic, supposedly eliminating the need for single-purpose management tools that reinforce silo-based management of data center infrastructure.

Anyway, besides broader hypervisor and platform support PlateSpin Workload Management has added other functionality.

PlateSpin Migrate, the old PlateSpin PowerConvert, which decouples server workloads and moves them between physical servers, virtual hosts and image archives, has gussied-up security, automation and scalability.

PlateSpin Protect, which was developed from PowerConvert, provides whole workload protection by replicating entire workloads for flexible image backup and hardware independent restore, as well as consolidated recovery using virtualization as a recovery platform for physical and virtual workloads. It’s also got new significant security, automation and scalability enhancements.

PlateSpin Recon, an updated edition of the old PowerRecon, is a workload profiling, analysis and planning solution. Novell says its assessment accuracy has been increased and it can import resource utilization data from other monitoring tools.

PlateSpin Orchestrate, described as the evolution of Novell’s ZENworks Orchestrator, interacts with configuration and storage resource management servers to manage the relationship between physical computer and storage resources. It also manages virtual resources, controlling the lifecycle of each virtual machine. It’s got a new interface.

PlateSpin Recon, PlateSpin Migrate and PlateSpin Protect are available now. PlateSpin Orchestrate will be available in the first quarter. No pricing was offered.