451 CAOS Theory 
A blog for the enterprise open source community
Vendors share the love with virtualization
Jay Lyman, September 12, 2007 @ 6:08 pm ETLast fall was marked by some fairly stunning announcements for open source. First software behemoth Oracle said it was going to offer its own support and version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Then, of course, was the pact announced between Microsoft and Novell. We also heard news that Sun would not only be open sourcing Java, but that it would be doing so under the GPL.
As the leaves have begun to change colors and fall to the ground, I’ve wondered what similar, big announcements might be happening this year. We’ll see, but so far, in speaking with operating system vendors and reading news reports, it’s amazing how much all of the different companies are talking (not negatively) about one another’s operating systems. The common thread is virtualization, and each company seems trying to be as good at providing and supporting the competition’s OS as the rival OS vendor itself. Let’s look at a few examples:
Among the top virtualization features of Sun’s latest Solaris 10 OS is the ability to run Linux applications without modification through Solaris Containers. This is part of Sun’s work on Project Indiana, aimed at making Solaris more suitable for Linux users. Sun will also be selling Windows and enabling Windows on Sun x64 systems as a newly signed Windows OEM. That’s almost equal billing for those ‘other’ operating systems.
Microsoft is certainly talking more and more about other operating systems (Linux), and is getting into the action part of its integration and virtualization work with Novell as it opens the two partners’ interoperability lab. First on the to-do list for the Cambridge, Mass.-based facility: making sure Microsoft and Novell virtualization technologies are interoperable.
For its part, Red Hat is also talking about Windows, and while the Linux vendor vows it won’t do a patent or IP-sharing deal with Redmond, significant portions of its latest RHEL 5.1 update center on, you guessed it, Windows virtualization and interoperability. The company would of course prefer customers use LDAP for server management, but for those handfuls (sarcasm) of Active Directory users out there, Red Hat uses the latest Samba software, plug-ins and other administration tools to facilitate it.
There is also IBM, which circle’s back nicely to Sun with their partnership announced last month. Big Blue, which will offer Solaris alongside AIX, Linux and Windows on some x86 systems, said it was proper for a mature vendor to offer such choices.
Customers, can you feel the love?
Categories: Linux, Software, Systems
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[...] All of this is happening at a time when the use and management of server and desktop computers is coming together through virtualization and continued mixing of operating systems and server/desktop deployment. This makes me wonder if Red Hat could help Ubuntu on the server with greater support and integration of the ‘other’ Linux. Why would Red Hat do such a thing? We already see the company, wisely, offering deeper integration and support for Windows — why would they do that? The answer is reality. Enterprise datacenters and even divisions rarely run one OS, let alone Linux. There are typically Windows and others in play and there is also much greater acceptance and use of Linux, which has become less exotic and more like any other OS in the datacenter. Let’s remember too that choice and flexibility are no longer customer requests, they are expectations, and every major server vendor supports at least some OS variety. [...]