Good tools are half the battle – even if you are just managing virtual machines. This month we take a practical look at virtualization, and we show you a new threat to watch for in the virtual future.

Novell today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire PlateSpin Ltd. The purchasing price is said to be US$ 205 m.

HP is looking to facilitate migration of Solaris enterprise users from Sun to HP hardware running on Linux. To this end, HP has now become a sales partner of the Transitive virtualization company.

Google uses Wine to provide Linux support for Picasa; now the search engine giant has commissioned the specialists from Codeweavers to improve Wine support for Adobe Photoshop CS and CS2 .

Sun Microsystems has been on another spending spree: Sun’s latest acquisition is said to be Innotek, the manufacturer of the Virtualbox Open Source virtualization solution.

Thanks to an agreement with the Ubuntu company, Canonical, Parallels can now distribute its commercial virtualization product, Parallels Workstation, via the Ubuntu package management system.

Version 3.2 of the Xen Open Source virtualization solution is now available. The new release not only adds new features, but comes with many modifications under-the-hood.

The OpenVZ project has released two new virtual machine images which will give administrators the ability to set up a new virtual server in less than a minute.