virtual red hat dan microsoft

In what amounts to a server-war détente, Microsoft, the world’s No. 1 software company, and Linux vendor Red Hat Monday announced that they would certify each other’s operating systems when running as guests in their server environments.

The rivals in the enterprise server market said that customers demanded that they make the move, reflecting the increased clout of virtualization software.


In a conference call announcing the deal, Mike Evans, vice president, corporate development, at Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat, said that the market for servers running a mixed Windows-Linux environment is growing and “moving beyond the early adopter” stage.

In a blog posting, Mike Neil, Microsoft’s general manager of virtualization strategy, who joined Mr. Evans in the conference call, acknowledged that the companies had bridged competitive and philosophical differences.

“Let me say that I'm sure everyone reading this can appreciate the distance between Microsoft and Red Hat is measured in more than just the 2,900 miles between Redmond, Washington, and Raleigh, North Carolina,” he said. “Microsoft and Red Hat have competed for customers and partners for some time now and as platform vendors continue to compete in the marketplace. Yet, our customers have told us that technical support for server virtualization is an area we must work together.”

Virtualization software lets servers operate closer to their hardware’s capacity by letting them run multiple operating systems and thus a greater variety of applications.

Under the reciprocal deal, Red Hat will validate Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows 2000 Server SP42, and Windows Server 2008 guests on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization technologies. Microsoft will validate Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 and 5.3 guests on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V (all editions) and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008.