14 DAY TRIAL // At the start of 2008, Microsoft indicated to customers, partners and competitors that it was committed to a new business strategy involving a strong focus placed on interoperability. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is, in this context, an illustrative example of the Redmond company working to bridge the gap between its proprietary software and additional solutions, even rival products. In May, Microsoft welcomed members of the Interoperability Vendor Alliance for a series of tests focused on virtualization technologies.
"Citrix, Novell and Sun tested some interoperability scenarios with us here at Microsoft that aim to prove how interoperability is possible on heterogeneous environments where customers are running virtualized environment on multiple platforms," explained Claudio Caldato, Senior Program Manager, US Corp Interoperability. Hyper-V is the hypervisor role in Windows Server 2008, which Microsoft has yet to finalize. But even with Hyper-V in development, the Redmond giant is not shy of moving its infrastructure to the hypervisor, having already virtualized its popular developer and IT professional portals MSDN and TechNet, with www.microsoft.com up next.
At the same time, Hyper-V is ready to flex its virtualization interoperability muscles. "The first part of the lab was about setting up all the machines, we installed Citrix XenServer, Novell XEN Virtual Server, Sun XVM and Microsoft new Hyper-V RC1 virtualization technologies on several machines in the Microsoft Partner lab. The goal now is to test some interoperability scenarios where applications and services are running on different platforms," Caldato added.
Moving onward with the testing process, Microsoft will implement the StockTrader application, designed for both IBM WebSphere and on .NET. StockTrader will permit the Redmond company to test cross-platform interoperability across not only virtualization solutions but also in terms of the programs designed to run on top of such architectures. But in the end, the strongest emphasis will be placed on building heterogeneous virtualization environments.
"This is only the first of a series of labs that will focus on Virtualization, in the next months we will continue to build more complex scenarios on top of the one we use for the first lab, we will add additional aspects such as Authentication and Authorization and system management so there is more to come," Caldato said.
Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V reached Release Candidate 1 milestone on May 20, 2008, and was made available for download via the Download Center. At the end of the past month, Microsoft also started serving Hyper-V RC1 through Windows Update.