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Rivals Red Hat, Microsoft strike a cooperative deal for virtualization solutions

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Bitter rivals Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) are burying the hatchet – at least over one issue: Virtualization.

The companies, which have traded barbs, threats and insults over the years due to their radically different views about operating systems, jointly announced Monday that they would join each other’s validation and certification programs for virtualization.

Virtualization, a fast-growing technology, enables multiple operating systems to be run simultaneously on the same device, such a servers.

Red Hat is strictly open source, supporting Linux, and makes its money off services and its Enterprise Server offerings.

Microsoft is the world’s top software company and is a staunch defender of proprietary solutions. More than once, Microsoft has threatened Red Hat with legal action about what it has said is infringement upon its technology.

In a statement, Red Hat said the companies were responding to "strong customer demand" as the reason for their cooperation.

"With this, we're allowing our customers to run heterogeneous virtualization solutions confidently," said Red Hat spokesperson Kerrin Catallozzi.

She noted that the agreement is limited, however.

"These agreements contain no patent or open source licensing components and contain no financial clauses beyond simple certification testing fees," she said.

Microsoft and Red Hat executives announced their agreement live on the Web just before noon on Monday.

"The world of IT today is a mixture of virtualized and non-virtualized environments. Red Hat is looking to help our customers extend more rapidly into virtualized environments, including mixed Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows Server environments," said Mike Evans, vice president of corporate development for Red Hat. "Red Hat listened when our customers asked us to provide interoperability between our respective guest and host virtualization solutions. We are excited to announce these agreements today as the result of our collaboration with Microsoft."

According to the companies, the agreement stipulates that:

• "Red Hat will validate Windows Server guests to be supported on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization technologies.
• "Microsoft will validate Red Hat Enterprise Linux server guests to be supported on Windows Server Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server.
• "Once each company completes testing, customers with valid support agreements will receive coordinated technical support for running Windows Server operating system virtualized on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization and for running Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualized on Windows Server Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server."

"Customers are rapidly adopting Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and in doing so are interested in support for running more operating systems on Hyper-V in their virtualized environment, including those from Red Hat," said Mike Neil, general manager of virtualization strategy at Microsoft, in the joint statement. "We welcome Red Hat’s participation in our Server Virtualization Validation Program and look forward to ongoing collaboration with them to bring the benefits of coordinated technical support to our customers for their heterogeneous IT environments."