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Expanding Interoperability to Community Linux

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Posted by Sandy Gupta
General Manager of Marketing, Open Solutions Group

As I mentioned in my blog last month, I’ve been on the road quite a bit this year to meet Hosters and Service Providers around the World.

Much of my time has been spent understanding their needs, and discussing how we can work together on mixed source Cloud solutions to help them differentiate from their competition.

We’ve already made some appreciable gains, and during my keynote at OSBC tomorrow morning I will share the expansion of our interoperability plans to community Linux. Specifically, effective immediately, Microsoft will support Windows Server2008 R2 Hyper-V to run CentOS.  CentOS is a popular Linux distribution for Hosters, and this was the number one requirement for interoperability that we heard from that community.

This development enables our Hosting partners to consolidate their mixed Windows + Linux infrastructure on Windows Server Hyper-V; reducing cost and complexity, while betting on an enterprise class virtualization platform. I want to thank the Microsoft Open Source Technology Center for the work they have done with the community to make this possible.

Within tomorrow morning’s keynote, my colleague Fabio Cunha and I will also demonstrate the cross-platform architecture of Microsoft’s Private Cloud. We will show implementation that supports multiple hypervisors and delivers a platform for the transformation of a heterogeneous IT infrastructure into an automated mixed source Cloud infrastructure. Fabio will show demos of various cross-platform capabilities of System Center Operations Manager, System Center Orchestrator, and also how customers can use a single pane of glass to deploy patches and updates across Windows and Linux Servers.  If you would like more information, drop us a line at osginfo@microsoft.com.

Microsoft continues to work on becoming more open in how we develop solutions, work with the open source communities, and how we’re making mixed source solutions a reality for businesses as they transition to the Cloud.  (See more on work being done towards cloud computing from this week’s TechEd in Atlanta).

Clearly, there’s more to be done especially as we think about the evolution of Cloud architectures and the growth of IT in emerging markets. We like to think that we have a mature IT ecosystem today, but in many ways, it is still in its infancy and there is a lot more scope of IT Automation is the promise of the cloud. Technologies continue to emerge and evolve. Innovation cycles are becoming shorter. Businesses are increasingly dependent on, and demanding of, their IT resources. There are many challenges – and opportunities – ahead of us. Competition is healthy, but collaboration will be the tide that raises all boats.  I look forward to continue reporting on these efforts going forward

In the meantime, I look forward to meeting as many of you as possible at OSBC and finding out how we can help you. Drop me a line, sandeeg@microsoft.com, or come by our pavilion.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2011
    Lol, that is really fun Microsoft...

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2011
    You have a long long long way to go before catching up to VM ware

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2011
    I've ended up writing a whole schwag of bash scrips to do a full install of CentOS, Hyper-V Integration Drivers and Security Patching. It was a major pain, but the only way to get full CentOS working.

  • Anonymous
    May 17, 2011
    @Ty - We're currently working on a mouse driver, and it has been submitted into the Linux kernel under the drivers/staging/hv tree. This is all about support for installation and configuration of CentOS. @Greg - Is there something more that we can be doing for scenarios such as yours?

  • Anonymous
    May 17, 2011
    Sandy Gupta tried to help Ralph Yarro, Darl McBride and Johannes Bayer when he worked for The SCO Group, Inc. by claiming that Linux violates copyrights. See http://groklaw.net.

  • Anonymous
    May 18, 2011
    Andreas, sounds like he is a very helpful guy indeed!

  • Anonymous
    May 18, 2011
    I just do not get why people always keep comparing incomparable technologies. It just makes no sense. Microsoft Hyper-V is NOT VMware and they do have some serious competing product to VMware in virtualization coming up, just wait and see things build up as we speak and will continue in future. Rome wasn’t built in a day. We should all embrace the diversity and freedom of choice. It creates fair competition, it forces leaders to be more flexible and we are the big winners at the end of the day. I am just so glad to finally see a complete mind shift at Microsoft and their efforts to support other operating system.

  • Anonymous
    May 18, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 18, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 18, 2011
    When debian will be fully supported ?

  • Anonymous
    May 19, 2011
    People must be really dumb to use Hyper-V, where there are so many better options out there... Xen, KVM, VMware, just to mention a few...

  • Anonymous
    May 23, 2011
    The upstream Hyper-V driver is indeed getting more sane after every release but still suffers (2.6.38.6) from lot of strange quirks like loosing random hangups due to NIC of Block device hangups on Debian and Ubuntu-based systems (not happening with RHEL/CentOS/SL 5 and IC 2.1 btw). Please focus on the upstream quality then do the backporting to 2.6.32-based enterprise Kernels (RHEL6, SLES11, and their clones) properly afterwards.

  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2011
    Hi, What will be what operating system? www.samandagibiber.com

  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2011
    Hi What will be what operating system? http://www.samandagibiber.com

  • Anonymous
    June 17, 2011
    Very good! But, is debian in your roadmap? When Debian will be oficially supported on Hyper-V?

  • Anonymous
    June 26, 2011
    Oh yes I am sure Microsoft are being "open" but the real aim is to find avenues to maintain their monopoly status. if they where serious about working with the open source community they woud NOT be beefing up  their restrictive usage protocols

  • Anonymous
    July 15, 2011
    maybe microsoft should stop patent trolling linux distributions before supporting them on their vms.

  • Anonymous
    July 19, 2011
    Are you at MS collaborating with Linux, so later you can ask for a patent deal with other linux vendors?

  • Anonymous
    March 02, 2012
    I'm getting no usable disk have been found error when running CentOS in Hyper-V on Win2008R2. I've tried both i386 and x86_64 disks.

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2016
    Pingback from CentOS Linux Guests Now Supported Within Hyper-V | 640K Ought To Be Enough For Everyone…