Windows Server for Linux Workloads
Posted by Amy Green
Director, Worldwide Marketing and Operations
Enabling open source software is a big part of Microsoft’s promise to support customers as they transform their datacenters with the cloud. In a recent blog post featured in an ongoing “What’s New in 2012 R2” series, Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson provides great detail on how open source interoperability is an integral part of Microsoft’s products and a priority for engineering teams, concluding that Windows is the “best infrastructure to run Linux workloads.”
Managing mixed IT environments can drive high levels of complexity that enterprises can address through consolidation on a single infrastructure capable of running and managing both Windows and Linux virtual machines consistently. With recent enhancements to Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2, customers can easily manage Windows and Linux environments side-by-side with a unified view across applications and workloads, spending more time on core business issues and less time dealing with operating system differences.
Interoperability work with the Linux community has made this Windows-Linux parity possible, ensuring that Linux is a first-class guest on Windows Server Hyper-V. In fact, due to these interoperability efforts, Hyper-V support is built in to the following distributions: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 and 6.4, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2 and SP3, Ubuntu Server 12.04, 12.10, and 13.04, CentOS 5.9 and 6.4, Oracle Linux 6.4 (Red Hat Compatible Kernel), and Debian GPU/Linux 7.0. It’s all part of a larger vision, which is to ensure that anything our customers want to run, they can run on Windows Server and in Windows Azure.
Brad and his team also detail a broad range of efforts to provide customers with increased flexibility for running open source-based applications on Windows, from simplified package management with CoApp (Common Open source Application Publishing Platform) to great PHP on Windows performance.
Recent partnership news, including support for Oracle software on Windows Server Hyper-V and in Windows Azure and development of a new Java development kit (JDK) with Azul Systems, illustrates the strong momentum behind support for open source software on our platforms.
For extensive detail on how Microsoft is helping customers transform the datacenter by enabling open source software (we really just scratched the surface with this summary), please see the complete In the Cloud blog post, and you can also follow Brad on Twitter @InTheCloudMSFT.
Let us know in the comments how Microsoft is supporting open source software in your datacenter or could do so in the future.