Red Hat, MS Ally For Interoperability Of Virtualisation Platforms

Red Hat, Inc. has signed reciprocal agreements with Microsoft Corporation to enable increased interoperability for the companies’ virtualisation platforms. Each company will join the other’s virtualisation validation/certification program and will provide coordinated technical support for their mutual server virtualisation customers. The reciprocal validations will allow customers to deploy heterogeneous, virtualised Red Hat and Microsoft solutions with confidence.

“The world of IT today is a mixture of virtualised and non-virtualised environments. Red Hat is looking to help our customers extend more rapidly into virtualised environments, including mixed Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows Server environments,” said Mike Evans, vice president, Corporate Development at Red Hat. “Red Hat listened when our customers asked us to provide interoperability between our respective guest and host virtualisation solutions. We are excited to announce these agreements today as the result of our collaboration with Microsoft.”

Red Hat and Microsoft customers will have the ability to run Microsoft Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual servers on either host environment with configurations that will be tested and supported by both virtualization and operating system leaders.

With this agreement Red Hat will validate Windows Server guests to be supported on Red Hat Enterprise virtualisation technologies and Microsoft will validate Red Hat Enterprise Linux server guests to be supported on Windows Server Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server. Also once each company completes testing, customers with valid support agreements will receive coordinated technical support for running Windows Server operating system virtualised on Red Hat Enterprise virtualisation, and for running Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualized on Windows Server Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server.

“Customers are rapidly adopting Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and in doing so are interested in support for running more operating systems on Hyper-V in their virtualised environment, including those from Red Hat,” said Mike Neil, general manager of Virtualisation Strategy at Microsoft. “We welcome Red Hat’s participation in our Server Virtualisation Validation Program and look forward to ongoing collaboration with them to bring the benefits of coordinated technical support to our customers for their heterogeneous IT environments.”