Virtualization Support for Red Hat

With many customers using server virtualization to run both Microsoft and Red Hat server products, the companies have agreed to provide testing, validation, and coordinated technical support for their products running on the other’s virtualization platforms. Once testing and validation is completed by both companies, a customer with valid support agreements will receive coordinated technical support for running Windows Server on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization and for running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Windows Hyper-V hypervisors. The nonexclusive agreement does not affect any other business issues between the two competitors, such as intellectual property licensing.

With this agreement, Red Hat joins Cisco, Citrix, Novell, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Unisys, Virtual Iron, and VMware as participants in Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program. Under this program, vendors can validate various configurations of their virtualization software with Microsoft software to ensure the configurations are supportable. Customers with validated solutions benefit from the support provided by Microsoft as a part of the regular Windows Server and server applications technical support framework. Microsoft also intends to provide cross-platform monitoring and management support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 in System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, to be released in the first half of 2009.