Comments on Novell/Microsoft Details

Novell and Microsoft today announced the first details of their Linux/Windows data center initiatives.  As providers of products to both Linux and Windows environments, we have a perhaps interesting take on these initiatives.  Our thoughts on each of the four areas are below:

Virtualization – Nothing earth shattering announced here.  MS is continuing to embrace Linux as a guest OS in MS Virtual Server 2005 R2 and will continue this support in Longhorn’s Viridian.  As well, MS plans to support running Windows in SUSE's ZEN.  The coupling here obviously is to take on the market leader in this space – VMWARE.  It will be interesting to see how Windows licensing plays into this puzzle once all of the parts are ready.  Are they going to try to squeeze out VMWARE by not offering as attractive server license pricing for people running VMWARE ESX?  That would be our guess. VMWARE is already preparing for that battle.

Web Services-Based Management – This is a step in the right direction for MS.  In the past MS choose to offer limited options for managing anything other than Windows OS.  Now with their new partnership, they are going to have to take their blinders off and realize that people actually use software other than MS in the data center.  So now customers will able to use MOM (aka, System Center Operation Manager 2007) to manage both Windows and Linux more fully as well as putting the appropriate open source hooks specified in the WS-Management in Windows to allow management of Windows from other management consoles, especially ZENWorks Orchestrator.

Directory and Identity Interoperability – They said much of nothing here other than they are working on better interoperability and will have more information in the near future.  This is an important task that must been done right to ensure that whatever LDAP solution you choose, you will be supported by both MS and Linux.  If support is better between MS and SUSE directory services, then this will be a great selling feature for SUSE over Red Hat.

Document Format Compatibility – In order for Linux to have a chance to take hold on the desktop, this will have to be as seamless as sharing documents between different versions of MS Office.  It seems as if in the past it was just OpenOffice trying to co-exist with MS.  Now Microsoft will be a more active participant and hopefully this cooperation will help achieve transparent interoperability between both Office platforms.