Microsoft-Novell: fleshing out the details 26 February, 2007 By Patricia Pickett

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In their efforts to provide customers with ways to run multi-platform, truly interoperable environments, Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. of Waltham, Mass., have zeroed in on four areas of technology: virtualization; Web services for managing physical and virtual servers; directory and identity interoperability; and document format compatibility.

The joint road map is a follow-up to the deal the two vendors announced in November of 2006.

According to Carmi Levy, senior research analyst with Info-Tech Research Group in London, Ont., the original announcement didn't have a whole lot of substance around it since there were no specifics around the products and services that would emerge from the partnership. The latest announcement, however, "really does start to put some meat around the original partnership agreement, providing a better idea of what the companies are going to develop going forward," Levy said.

Tony Iams, senior analyst with research firm Ideas International Inc. in Rye Brook, N.Y., characterized the most recent announcement as containing "plumbing-type details," adding that "it's not really a bombshell like the announcement back in the fall, but it provides the technical credibility to make the (original) announcement stand up in practice...and make the alliance work."

Enabling multi-platform virtualization

Iams said the technological roadmap really boils down to virtualization and the support needs that accompany this new capability. Before the original announcement, it was technically possible to run both Windows and Linux on either platform, but Microsoft was unable to support Linux being virtualized on its platform, and Novell was not able to support the virtualization of Windows on SUSE Linux. "Both companies found that users, in order to really start to bet on both platforms, really needed to have some way to get a fully supported solution for virtualizing either operating system on either platform," he said.

The roadmap outlined three virtualization scenarios that the vendors will support. The first one is running the current version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), 10, as a virtualized guest on an upcoming service pack of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 service pack 1. Although the development is novel from the heterogeneous environment support standpoint for Microsoft, it was not the most crucial portion of the announcement, Iams said.

"I think the more strategically significant part relates to Microsoft's future version of Microsoft Windows Server, Longhorn," Iams noted. The vendors agreed to make it possible to host SLES 10 as an enlightened guest on Longhorn, using the Windows Server virtualization technology, code-named Veridian. In addition, it will be possible to host Longhorn as a paravirtualized guest on SLES 10, using the Xen virtualization technology embedded in the Linux operating system.

Iams pointed out that there was no express commitment for running the current version of Windows Server, 2003, on top of SLES 10. "Microsoft is not terribly interested in helping Novell host Windows workloads on top of Linux, which is not surprising, because strategically it's not in Microsoft's interests at all. They don't really want to see, at present, the footprint of SLES 10 increasing at the expense of Windows."

The other reason behind the omission of Windows Server 2003 was technical. "That's not going to be the most efficient way to host Windows on top of Linux because the current implementation of Xen in SLES 10 is not really optimized yet to run Windows," Iams said. The setup can work but is dependent on the maturity of both Xen and of Intel and AMD processors to support the scenario -- neither of which are quite there yet, he said.

One way to overcome the problem is to build support for Xen into the Windows operating system, which improves the efficiency of guest OSs, Iams said. Running SUSE on top of Longhorn will be easier for the same reason. In addition, Veridian has been "designed to be very similar to Xen," which will provide strong interoperability with the ability to run SLES 10 on Longhorn moving forward, Iams said.