Linux gets virtual support from Microsoft

Martin LaMonica CNET News

Published: 03 Apr 2006 09:50 BST

Microsoft will support customers who chose to run Linux with Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005 R2, software for running multiple operating system instances on one machine.

In addition, the company on Monday said that it has now made Virtual Server 2005 R2 — which the company had charged either $99 for up to four physical processors or $199 for an unlimited number of processors (£57 and £114 respectively) — a free download. The announcements were made in conjunction with LinuxWorld in Boston this week.

Microsoft said that it has developed software to simplify the installation of Linux distributions from Red Hat and Novell SuSE to run on Virtual Server 2005 R2 on Windows. In addition, Microsoft will provide technical support customers running Windows and Linux side by side.

"We’ve made a long-term commitment to make sure that non-Windows operating systems can be run in a supported manner, both on top of Virtual Server and our future virtualisation products," said Zane Adam, director of Windows Server product marketing, in a statement.

Microsoft has said that the server edition of Windows Vista will have virtualisation built into it. Specifically, it said it is developing hypervisor software, code-named Viridian, to host multiple operating systems on one machine.

Microsoft faces competition in the market from EMC's subsidiary VMware and increasingly the Xen project that's being built into forthcoming versions of SuSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.