Red Hat, Microsoft alliance aimed at VMware

A LANDMARK technical support agreement announced overnight between Red Hat and Microsoft is squarely aimed at destabilising virtualisation leader VMware.
Microsoft has caved-in to pressure from customers who've been demanding to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) smoothly on their Windows machines.
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"Microsoft and Red Hat recently signed agreements to test and validate our server operating systems running on each other’s hypervisors," Microsoft virtualisation general manager Mike Neil said.

According to TechTarget, a hypervisor, or virtual machine manager, is a program that allows multiple operating systems to share a single hardware host.

"Until today there’s been one barrier, not product related, that we haven’t been able to overcome to meet customer and partner demand.

"The ability to run and support Red Hat Enterprise Linux within a guest virtual machine on Windows Server 08 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2008," he wrote on his blog.

Mr Neil claimed that Microsoft's virtualisation offerings have far better returns compared with VMware.

"...customers and partners have been getting huge value from server consolidation projects, (and) have been able to increase business continuity at much lower costs than with VMware ... (they) have decreased the time and cost required to deliver applications to end users," he said.

Red Hat has joined Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program while Microsoft has become a Red Hat partner for virtualisation interoperability and support.

Microsoft said it will be listed in the Red Hat Hardware Certification List once it has completed the Red Hat certification process in the second half of the year.

Unlike the Microsoft-Novell deal, yesterday's agreement has no patent or open-source licensing covenants.

"There are no financial clauses beyond simple certification testing fees. These are straightforward certification and validation agreements," Red Hat platform business vice-president Scott Crenshaw said on his blog.

Novell pays Microsoft "protection money" so the software giant won't sue individuals who have contributed to developing Novell's Suse Linux operating system.

When the alliance was announced in 2006, the open source community viewed the move as a betrayal on Novell's part.

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BY Fran Foo
Source：AUSTRALIAN IT

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