Microsoft, Citrix, Novell and Sun Microsystems all made announcements around virtualisation overnight.
Microsoft and Citrix revealed they would announce next week that they would work more closely on virtualisation, building on a close relationship going back to 1989. Microsoft will validate version 5 of the XenServer hypervisor, Citrix's virtualisation software, for use with the Windows Server 2008 operating system.
At a roundtable in the UK, Neil Sanderson, head of virtualisation products at Microsoft outlined the plans. The agreement means in practice that customers using XenServer 5 can now "call about that hypervisor and [Microsoft support] will take that call", Sanderson said. That would be carried out under Microsoft Premier Support, he said.
Across the Atlantic in the US, Microsoft and another partner, Novell, said they would jointly support a scenario in which Suse Linux is running as a guest operating system under Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualisation platform.
The companies said partners such as Dell would test the setup at the joint lab the two companies have in Cambridge. It's the latest fruit of a nearly 2-year-old alliance between the two companies.
"The collaboration between Microsoft and Novell has been built by our desire to meet our customers' and partners' IT needs, and to deliver solutions that support customers' mixed-source environments," Microsoft Vice President Bob Kelly said in a statement.
"For customers standardising on Microsoft's hypervisor who also have a mixed-source IT environment, this virtualisation solution gives that choice. For channel partners who need a cross-platform hypervisor offering, our work with Novell gives them an easy starting point."
The Sun also rises
Meanwhile, Sun Microsystems launched an open source
virtualisation platform for servers, under the banner xVM
Server.
Although the product is free to download, support, including access to patches and training, costs US$500 per physical server per year.
xVM is built to work on Windows, Linux and Unix operating systems, including Sun's Solaris, and is also interoperable with VMWare, allowing workloads to be moved between the two platforms.
Keeping with the open source theme, Sun also launched xVMServer.org yesterday, an online open source community to develop and improve the product. Sun already offers the desktop virtualisation system xVM VirtualBox and the virtual desktop consolidation application, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.
Colin Barker reported on Citrix and Microsoft ZDNet.co.uk, while Tim Ferguson reported on Sun Microsystems for Silicon.com. Ina Fried reported for News.com about Microsoft's arrangement with Novell.
