Starting with the Windows-Linux interoperability agreement inked with Novell at the end of 2006, Microsoft has produced comprehensive results out of the efforts to bridge its proprietary platform with the open source operating system. Of course that Microsoft did little more than to protect its own interests with the Novell partnership, leaning hard on open source customers in order to tip them in the direction of intellectual property assurance agreements. But at the same time, the Redmond company also addressed the increasing demand for a high level of interoperability in heterogeneous environments. The Microsoft and Novell partnership managed to produce a new joint lab in September 2007, with resources from both companies aimed at providing solutions for mixed source scenarios.

2008 will bring to the table an array of new offerings from Microsoft when it comes to the server side. February 27th,2008 is the official availability date of Windows Server 2008. There is a complex set of offerings built around the Windows Server 2008 core, and one of them is focused on the high performance computing market. In November 2007, the Redmond company made available for download a beta of its newest version of Windows for supercomputers: Windows HPC Server 2008 System. The successor of Compute Cluster Server 2003 is set for final release in the second half of the coming year.

Still, Microsoft is in full throttle when it comes down to Windows and Linux interoperability, and a new whitepaper titled "How to Build a Dual-Boot Linux / Windows HPC Server 2008 System" comes to prove just that. Giovanni Marchetti, Technical Evangelist, Microsoft, revealed that the document will "illustrate the steps necessary to build a dual-boot Linux / Windows HPC Server 2008 solution. Although it is intended for use on HPC clusters, the techniques illustrated are applicable with little modification to deployment systems based on Windows Deployment Services, which is used in HPC Server 2008. The procedure can be summarized in: 1. Verify the existing Linux disk layout. 2. If necessary, modify the existing Linux partitions to free space for Windows installation. 3. Install Windows. 4. Set the active boot partition so that the desired o/s is started at the next reboot."