Sun and Microsoft Cosy up on Virtualisation

By Greg McNevin

September 11, 2008: Sun has announced new developments in cross-platform virtualisation, with Microsoft making it simple to integrate Sun’s xVM portfolio with Windows Server 2008.

As part of Sun's participation in Microsoft's Server Virtualisation Validation Program, it’s xVM Server software, an open, datacentre-grade hypervisor, will be validated to work with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and earlier versions.

Sun says that this will give Microsoft and Sun customers better interoperability and a joint support experience for virtual infrastructure deployments, but beyond this, Sun and Microsoft are also working together to offer Sun’s Solaris operating system as a certified guest on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

In return, Sun says that it is expanding support for Microsoft technologies by imbuing Sun Ray thin client customers with the ability to access Windows as a guest OS running on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

“Sun is committed to offering interoperability with Microsoft's products, so that our mutual customers can run their choice of operating systems on any virtualisation platform on Windows-compatible x64 servers from Sun,” says Steve Wilson, vice president of xVM, Sun Microsystems.

“By collaborating with Microsoft, we are delivering on the promise of cross-platform virtualisation and most importantly, helping customers reap the full benefits of their virtualisation investments.”

Sun has also announced that it has made key pieces of its virtualisation software open source via the OpenxVM.org community.

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