After acquiring PlateSpin earlier this year for $205M, Novell has formally renamed its flagship capacity planning product PlateSpin PowerRecon to simply PlateSpin Recon. The latest 3.5 release has some exciting new features:

1. Extended hypervisor support

Citrix XenServer 4.1 and 5.0 as well as Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V are now supported (VMware ESX was supported in previous releases).

2. Platform expansion

Microsoft Windows Vista (32- and 64-bit), Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (32- and 64-bit), Linux (64-bit), and Novell NetWare (5.1, 6.0 and 6.5) are now supported.

3. CPU Normalization

Differences between CPU manufacturers, generations and architectures are now taken into account in the Consolidation Planning Module.