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Microsoft Faces Skeptics at Open Source Conference

By: John K. Waters

4/8/2008

Nearly a year and a half after striking their improbable alliance to provide better interoperability between open source and Windows-based platforms, Microsoft and Novell told developers last week that the pact has yielded technical benefits but there's still work to be completed, particularly on the interoperability between the two companies' enterprise directory platforms.

Representatives of both companies provided a status report of their collaboration at the annual Linux/Open Source on Wall Street conference held in New York this week. Microsoft says it has sold more than 100,000 SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) licenses to about 60 large enterprise customers, among them Credit Suisse, HSBC, Synovus Financial Corp., and Wal-Mart.

"We've learned a lot," said Peter Rodriques, Microsoft's director of customer advocacy and licensing, during his opening remarks. "For the most part, it's been incredibly successful in terms of feedback in the business community and technical communities."

In an interview, Rodriques added that Microsoft's pact with Novell helped set the stage for Redmond's interoperability pledge, made in February.

Virtual Progress
Microsoft and Novell have identified four key goals in their technical collaboration agreement (TCA). To date, the companies have made the most progress in ensuring both platforms work in virtualized environments so that Windows Server is recognized on an SLES host and vice versa, said Jose Thomas, a senior technical evangelist at Microsoft. The other three areas of focus include common systems management, interoperability of Microsoft's Active Directory with Novell's eDirectory, and document format compatibility.

Thomas demonstrated SLES running as a virtual machine on a Windows Server 2008 host and underscored that the same interoperability works in the reverse scenario. The goal, according to Thomas, was for Windows to run as a "fully enlightened" guest on SLES and vice versa. The demo used a beta version of Microsoft's much-anticipated Hyper-V hypervisor.

"The hypervisor treats the SuSE operating system just like it treats Windows, which is great because from a performance perspective, you're at par," Thomas said. "But on top of that, from a management perspective, from a reporting capability, all of the things that the hypervisor is doing from Windows, you can go ahead and do for SuSE, as well."

The two companies jointly developed adaptors to achieve that result, Thomas added. To address systems management, however, the two companies for now are focusing more on the Web services standard WS-Management protocol.