Microsoft certifies RHEL on Hyper-V, validates Windows on KVM

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Last week Microsoft and Red Hat announced the certification of their operating systems, Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), on each other virtualization platforms, Hyper-V and KVM.

It is a major announcement in many ways.

First of all, customers that have Windows/Linux mixed environments finally have a decent choice. 
Side by side with Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux, now Hyper-V (both R1 and R2) supports RHEL 5.2, 5.3 and the new 5.4.

More importantly, Microsoft and Red Hat validated the use of Windows Server 2003, 2008 and 2008 R2 as guest operating system on the KVM implementation that comes with RHEL 5.4.

On top of that Microsoft has even accepted to provide support to Red Hat users that run most of its enterprise applications inside KVM virtual machines.

Now, and only now, Red Hat has something concrete to tell to the customers.
With the large majority of virtual machines running Windows worldwide, without this mandatory step the new Red Hat offering couldn’t be considered anything more than an interesting future platform.

Thanks to the Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) instead, KVM, or at least the Red Hat implementation of KVM, is at the same level of VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer, Novell Xen and Oracle VM Server in terms of support for Microsoft technologies.

Now Red Hat has to hurry up and show the serious stuff.