Novell is buying five-year-old Toronto-based PlateSpin Ltd for $205 million cash, calling it a “huge step” and a “strategic acquisition” whose management software will help define Novell as an infrastructure company and assure it a place selling into the next-generation data center.

See, PlateSpin manages workloads on either physical or virtual hosts and is supposed to be good at server consolidation, data center relocation, disaster recovery, controlling virtual machine sprawl and handling billing and chargebacks

And since virtualized architecture is supposed to become the norm in most IT organizations over the next few years Novell expects to make a killing furnishing the management solutions that will be needed.

During a conference call connected with the acquisition announcement Novell repeatedly mentioned PlateSpin’s growth rate but declined to quantity it.

All we know is that PlateSpin had revenues of $20 million last year and, although low profile, it managed to attract a client as prestigious as British Petroleum.

Novell is taken with the idea that PlateSpin is agnostic and supports the various virtualization widgetry out there – VMware, Microsoft, Citrix – as well as Linux, Unix and Windows.

But Novell is also expecting PlateSpin to give Novell’s SUSE-based Xen virtualization a leg up in the market.

PlateSpin’s widgetry, however, won’t be open sourced.

PlateSpin fills a hole in Novell’s Zenworks Orchestrator skills.

Unlike PlateSpin, Orchestrator can’t quite spot which workloads are ripe for virtualization or convert them from physical to virtual, according to Novell’s marketing chief John Dragoon.

• Novell Releases New PlateSpin Protect Rev