By now many corporations in the world approaching virtualization have discovered that finding proper ISV support for their virtual machines of choice is still one of the biggest challenges.
At this point the situation is probably good enough for VMware customers, but when a firm decides to adopt a new platform like Microsoft Hyper-V things may become more complex.
Of course, with the proper incentives, Microsoft will have no problems in persuading the whole ecosystem to support its hypervisor, but it will require some time in any case.
So it’s very good news to know that SAP has officially extended its support for virtual infrastructures to Microsoft Hyper-V.
Besides VMware no other virtualization vendors are currently supported (which means issues for Citrix, Virtual Iron, Novell and Red Hat customers).
To reflect this new policy SAP also updated a small paper which describes the exact guest environments supported for VMware and Microsoft platforms.
Note that at the moment SAP only supports the Hyper-V edition included with Windows Server 2008 and not the new Hyper-V Server 2008.
Update: As several Novell representatives point out, SAP should have at least another hypervisor mentioned in the document above: the Xen platform included in SUSE Linux Enterprise 10.
Novell and SAP in fact announced the support for that virtualization engine in March 2007 and as far as we can see the policy is still in place.
We wait a formal answer from the two companies on the incongruence.