Today I attended the Novell and Microsoft Interoperability presentation at Summer Place in Johannesburg. Although there was nothing really new for me here, since we been using virtualisation for  over two years already, it was interesting to see a Microsoft representative talking about Linux. 

2009 the year for virtualisation?

This is the second virtualisation presentation that I have been to this year. The other was by Redhat. It looks like the vendors have all decided that 2009 is the year of virtualisation. This is probably due to a combination of the technology reaching maturity and the pressure to reduce costs, bought on by the current economic crisis, which virtualisation is uniquely positioned to address.

Virtualisation Benefits

What is beyond doubt is the benefit that virtualisation brings to a company's IT environment. Beside costs saving in energy and improved utilisation of server resources, it also bring with it greater flexibility and higher availability. Machines can now be provisioned in hours as opposed to weeks. Critical applications can be migrated from device to device without any downtime and the same goes with backups.

Microsoft was keen to emphasis that Novell Suse Linux is the only version of Linux for which they offer support and have such a "deep relationship" with. This extends to there being a joint interoperability lab, staffed my Microsoft and Novell employees, dedicated to ensuring that everything runs smoothly in environments where these operating systems co-exist. The interop web site can be found here. This can only be good news for customers, especially those who have been taking advantage of open source solutions in their environment for years. Now, finally they can get proper support from both vendors and can look forward to improving interop going forward.

What virtualisation solution to choose?

So with all these virtualisaiton solutions out there,, and each being able to run the others os as a virtual machine, which should one choose for the hypervisor? In the short term the answer will probably be the one that your support staff feel most comfortable with. In the long run, I think it will depend if any of the solutions are able to differentiate themselves, in anyway, with some innovation, or more likely, with the best management and support tools. After all these companies are all giving away the virtualisation part for free, so it's only in the support and management space that they can make money. Personally I recommend running windows in a virtual environment on top of Linux because of Linux proven superiority when it comes to security. My money for the best management tools is on Novell's Platespin, for now.

So does Microsoft now love Linux?

One could see that the Microsoft representative was not entirely happy about having to consider Linux, but demands by their customers have forced Microsoft to consider better integration with Linux.  They are slowly adapting to a world were they have to co-exist with Linux and open source. It seemed clear as well that they are testing the waters and who know what they might try next if Linux looks like a big money earner? Maybe an Microsoft Linux distribution?