Posts tagged with RedHat

Earlier this week, many were probably asking themselves, “Is the Moon now in its 7th house? Did Jupiter just align with Mars?” when they learned of the most recent Microsoft and Red Hat announcement. Two fierce global competitors agreeing to validate and certify each other’s virtualization software and coordinate technical support. Seems a bit far fetched.

And while I personally am thrilled with this development, I think what’s most interesting is that the industry seems to be recognizing this for what it is: a major milestone for the evolution of virtualization, a big step for the enterprise credibility of open source, and most importantly, a big win for customers. Matt Asay at CNet does a good job of reviewing the announcement and giving credit where credit is due.

Most are focusing their kudos on the fact that this alliance promises to create a new level of interoperability for virtualization and that it results in a “win-win” for users, who now have even more freedom to select the software that they feel is best suited for their specific application environments. But for me, the real takeaway is that this alignment definitely illustrates how quickly virtualization is maturing. We are now entering the Age of “Coopetition“ - the phrase Ray Noorda, past CEO of Novell, coined to describe cooperation with competitors.

In short: This is a necessary milestone for the mainstream acceptance of virtualization and clearly reflects mounting pressure from users who don’t want to live in a world of siloed virtualized environments.

We all know that the early adopters of virtualization had to accept the fact that some operating systems were not supported as guests by some hypervisors. They also had to learn how to plan for cross-generational processor live migration limitations that reduce their flexibility. But the mainstream market isn’t willing to bleed as much and wants broader interoperability assurances before they jump on board with virtualization.

The Red Hat and Microsoft agreement allows customers to run Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual servers on either environment with configurations tested by both sides. And it is not the first of such agreements – we all remember how the world shook the day Microsoft and Novell announced their cooperative agreement in late 2006.

AMD has played a key role in driving the open innovation needed for effective x86-based virtualization. We took the route of publishing our proposed specifications for hardware-assisted virtualization (AMD-V™) and IOMMU (AMD-Vi) to ignite industry-wide dialogues and illicit partner and user input.  We have worked with standards group, like the PCI SIG, to ensure that virtualization technologies fit into their specifications. Early on in the development of the AMD Opteron™ processor we opted to use HyperTransport™ technology for chip-to-chip interconnections instead of taking a closed architectural approach like Intel has done with Nehalem and its proprietary Quick Path Interface.  By the way, Mike Uhler, vice president of Accelerated Computing, was just appointed president of the HyperTransport board, underscoring AMD’s continued support of driving innovation through standards-based technologies.

As virtualization continues to mature, my hope is that this new age of coopetition will drive live migration across vendor platforms—one of the last big challenges for virtualization (and customers). While we were able to showcase this technology with Red Hat, last October we haven’t been able to make it a reality—yet. While live migration across vendor platforms is a technical and complicated it would allow customers to realize the full potential virtualization technology and have the ultimate flexibility of their data center.

While my hope for cross vendor live migration is a bit far off, many thanks to our partners Microsoft and Red Hat for taking this big step and giving customers even more flexibility and control of their virtualized servers. Making competitive products interoperable will give virtualization the freedom it needs to become a pervasive technology. It also means that vendors like AMD, Microsoft, and Red Hat have to stay on their toes, developing cooperative products that address real user problems.

Margaret Lewis is a Product Marketing Director at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.