So far the Microsoft strategy to counter VMware leadership even without a competitive product has been interesting: signing interoperability partnerships with its biggest competitors so to grant its upcoming hypervisor Hyper-V the widest and most valuable support from day 1.
Microsoft executed pretty well, closing agreements with Novell, Citrix, Virtual Iron and Sun.
With Novell the Redmond giant went even further, building a 2,500-square-foot interoperability lab in Cambridge. Now the company is replicating with Sun:
Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Microsoft Corporation today announced two new milestones in their ongoing alliance – the official opening of the Sun/Microsoft Interoperability Center on Microsoft’s Redmond campus for optimizing Microsoft applications on Sun Fire x64 server systems and storage, and the availability of the Sun Infrastructure Solution for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.
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The Sun/Microsoft Interoperability Center serves as a working lab for tuning, benchmarking and interoperability solutions creation. It will be designed to include:
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- Joint work to help enable cross-platform server virtualization, including Windows Hyper-V and Sun xVM software;
- Cross-company collaboration to allow Sun Ray thin client software to provide a first-rate virtual desktop for the Windows environment and supports Windows technologies.