Microsoft, Red Hat Agree To Mutual Virtualization SupportMicrosoft, Red Hat Agree To Mutual Virtualization Support

Microsoft and Red Hat on Tuesday signed cooperative agreements to support one another's technology in virtualized environments.

In doing so, the companies have wed in a highly anticipated but unlikely marriage of strange bedfellows that serves as a reminder that sometimes customer demand forces companies' hands after all.

"Maybe you're wondering what took so long," Microsoft's virtualization general manager Mike Neil wrote on his blog. "That's a fair question given the number of customers and partners that have been asking for this result." In the end, Neil wrote, demand overcame the philosophical and competitive differences between Microsoft and its open source competitor.

There's little question that this is a forced marriage, as Red Hat's own Web site makes clear with art. A banner graphic atop the page detailing the reciprocal agreements announces in bold, all capital letters that "customer demand has spoken." The banner also features a prominent road sign with a double-headed arrow pointed in opposite directions that sometimes signifies interoperability. Translation: You made us do it.

Many, if not most, enterprise IT environments today include some instances of both Microsoft Windows Servers and Linux servers, with the latter often running Red Hat Enterprise Server. IDC estimates roughly 80% of all virtualized servers running as guest operating systems are Windows Server or Red Hat Enterprise Server. That likely pushes demand for some sort of agreement sky high as more companies consolidate and virtualize their data centers.

As part of the agreements, Microsoft will run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 and 5.3 as a guest in Hyper-V environments, and will lend its hand to technical support and documentation. Red Hat will also run Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows 2000 Server SP4, and Windows Server 2008 as guests on Red Hat virtualization technologies, with similar tech support offered. Future products will be supported, and customers can expect the first pieces of support for these options sometime this year.

Microsoft has also announced plans to monitor and manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 in System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, due sometime before midyear. Among other things, SCOM 2007 R2's Red Hat support means customers will be able to manage applications that are distributed among Windows Server and Red Hat environments.

The agreements aren't without limits. It's unclear as Red Hat pursues its own kernel virtual machine hypervisor whether its Xen-based Linux virtualization will be part of the program, according to Burton Group analyst Richard Jones. That limits the level of support for past Red Hat versions.

Recently, Microsoft has reached out to Red Hat in attempts to secure a broader agreement like one between Microsoft and Novell that includes intellectual property and open source licensing rights, only to be rebuffed and rebuked on the record by Red Hat executives who argued that interoperability should only come through open standards and open source. The two parties repeatedly make it clear in announcing this deal that it doesn't include anything of the sort.

However unlikely, this isn't the first time either Microsoft or Red Hat haven't only acknowledged one another positively but actively worked in support of one another. Starting in 2006, Microsoft supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux guest running on its ill-fated Virtual Server product, which itself was a shocking development to many.

As part of Microsoft's deal with Novell, Microsoft said it would spend $60 million over five years to market Linux-Windows virtualization and $34 million to finance a Microsoft sales force to jointly sell Windows and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Again, this deal includes no such effort on behalf of Microsoft.

For its part, Red Hat joined Microsoft's Interop Vendor Alliance in 2007, though it's unclear what if anything has come from Red Hat's participation in that group, which aims to increase interoperability between Microsoft products and those of member companies. Red Hat and Microsoft have also cooperated on Web services standards.

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