Want Linux under Windows? Microsoft and Novell hype it up!

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 11 September 2008 12:05

Business IT - Technology

"For customers standardising on Microsoft's hypervisor who also have a mixed-source IT environment, this virtualization solution gives that choice," said Bob Kelly, corporate vice president of infrastructure server marketing within Microsoft's server and tools business.

"For channel partners who need a cross-platform hypervisor offering, our work with Novell gives them an easy starting point," he added.

Add to that Dell's involvement in the partnership - which will see the hardware vendor test and validate the software at the Microsoft/Novell interoperability lab and then provide support - and you have a convincing story.

"Virtualisation radically simplifies IT, providing greater flexibility and helping our customers focus their resources on innovation instead of maintenance," said Rick Becker, vice president of software and solutions at Dell's product group.

"By supporting this new solution from Microsoft and Novell, we can provide our customers running mixed Linux and Windows environments with an optimized solution that is quick and simple to deploy," he claimed.

That's not to say other vendors can't deliver the goods when it comes to  Linux. HP, for example, tests and supports multiple distributions, and claims to have handled over 99 percent of its customers' Linux service from its own resources.

And some people prefer the hypervisor approach as used by VMware's ESX, where the there is no host operating system. Instead, the hypervisor is a thin layer on top of the hardware, with the operating systems all running in their own virtual machines.

Enough of the alternatives - what about the nuts and bolts of the way SUSE, Server 2008 and Hyper-V work together? See page three.