A couple of stories to share with you this morning.
The first involves an agreement between Microsoft and Citrix to standardize on a common virtual hard drive format. This will mean increased interoperability between the two companies respective virtualization platforms.
You can read more about the agreement in an article on Information Week;
“Agreement on VHD is a necessary first step we are taking to ensure IT can rapidly adopt the full benefits of virtualization,” Wes Wasson, VP of worldwide marketing at Citrix, said in a joint statement with Microsoft. “Today’s announcement signals our continuing, joint commitment with Microsoft to provide virtualization solutions to create and manage dynamic IT environments well into the future.”
Those of you following this area of technology will know that Microsoft’s VHD format has been available under its “Open Specification Promise” since late 2006. This means that the specification is available at no charge and with no restrictions on implementations.
The second story focuses on the continuing evolution of the relationship between Microsoft and Novell, today sees the opening of an Interoperability Lab that will be jointly staffed by the two companies to look at areas of interoperability between the Linux and Windows platforms.
You will find additional coverage in this Computerworld article;
Two of the lab’s first projects will be to improve virtualization and systems management when the two operating systems are used together.
Tom Hanrahan, Microsoft’s director of Linux interoperability, said that engineers will work on improving existing virtualization technologies, which often don’t let the virtualized environment communicate with the hardware underneath the host operating system. Engineers are working on ways of letting Windows treat Linux drivers as if they were native Windows drivers, and vice versa, which would lead to better performance for graphics, disk input and output and more.
“The lab is open for business, and we are working on interoperability projects that we’ve heard are important from our customers,” Hanrahan said.