A press release from Microsoft on November 2nd, 2006 announces “a set of technical collaboration agreements” to provide better interoperability between Microsoft and Novell products. The press release states that the agreement has a broad scope and will concentrate on three technical areas of the market; Virtualization, Web Services for server infrastructure management (physical and virtual), and Document format compatibility. Microsoft and Novell will operate a joint research facility in order to architect and test new software solutions.
The virtualization component is, of course, particularly interesting to me. Could this be a move to establish a foothold as true players in the booming virtualization market? Both companies are currently marketing their own virtualization solutions. Microsoft is banking on its own Virtual Server product, while Novell is relying on Xen to provide its virtualization platform. Neither product has taken off in a production environment like VMWare’s ESX server has. I suspect that Microsoft does not like, nor is used to, being the underdog. This move shows that Microsoft is serious about moving into the virtualization market.
In the press release Jeff Jaffe, the vice president and chief technology officer at Novell stated, “As a result of this collaboration, customers will now be able to run virtualized Linux on Windows or virtualized Windows on Linux.” Is anyone else excited about this monumental technological breakthrough? Oh that’s right, VMWare has been able to do that for years. I applaud both companies for catching up to the 21st century, but the ability to run different operating systems has been a trivial matter for VMWare for quite some time.
The only way that any company providing virtualization solutions will gain a strong foothold in a market that is already dominated by VMWare, is if that company offers something more compelling than virtualizing different Operating Systems on the same hardware. Management and automation of a virtual infrastructure is a segment of the market that is fairly new and untapped. VMWare is already getting a jump start in this area with its VMWare Infrastructure 3 offering. What is Microsoft’s next move?
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