Fujitsu is coming into North America with the widgetry it’s been selling in Japan that gives users control of both physical and virtualized blade servers through a single management interface.

The stuff is called RCVE, Resource Coordinator Virtual Edition, and is supposed to cut the time and resources needed to install, configure and roll over workloads on blades, regardless of whether they’re physical or virtual.

Currently it can manage VMware. By the middle of next year it should be able to handle Hyper-V and Xen as well.

Fujitsu claims the solution is cheaper than clustering as far as high-availability rollover goes and mimics VMotion for the physical operating systems.

Hardware costs should be lower because you only need one spare blade for multiple environments.

The single interface obviously simplifies administration and forms the basis for policy-driven sys admin. And it’s supposed to automate SAN reconfiguration when switching servers. We’re also talking virtual I/O here. Servers that are rolled over keep their identity including pre-existing SAN and LAN connections.

The easy functionality is supposed to beat out HP and IBM.

Pricing was supposed to be $7,600 per Primergy chassis with 10 blades including the agent software for either Windows or Linux blades but the company has yet to confirm that – understandable perhaps given the fluctuating dollar. The package, whatever it costs, includes the management console software that controls up to five chassis.