Microsoft and Red Hat Make Good on Virtualization Promise

Promised earlier this year, the pact between Microsoft and Red Hat allows each company’s respective operating systems to function as a guest on top of a virtual machine from the other company. That means that an instance of Red Hat Linux could be deployed on top of Hyper-V running on Windows Server 2008 or an instance of Windows Server 2008 could be deployed as a guest on top of virtual machine software running on top of a Linux distribution from Red Hat.

Red Hat intends to roll out virtualization management tools later this year that will not only allow its customers to manage any virtual machine running on top of Red Hat Linux, but any guest operating system as well.

Microsoft has touted the cross management capabilities with Novell as one of the primary reasons that customers should opt for Suse Linux over Red Hat if they feel compelled to run a Linux distribution alongside a Windows server. But if systems management tools from Microsoft, Red Hat or Novell can manage any guest residing on top of their platform, the uniqueness of the Microsoft-Novell alliance is narrowed considerably.

Longer term, as more customers opt for multi-core processor servers capable of running large numbers of instances of server operating systems, the need to be able to manage Windows and Linux servers via a common management framework will become a standard requirement, versus a special benefit bestowed by any given vendor.