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The two companies have announced that they will jointly develop four areas of technology to address significant problems faced by enterprise customers today: virtualisation, Web services for managing physical and virtual servers and directory and identity interoperability.

Collaboration on virtualisation will work towards the development of technology that will enable Linux and Windows servers to consolidate server workloads in heterogeneous data centres. Enterprises will be able to host SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 from Novell as a virtualised guest on an upcoming service pack of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 service pack 1 and as an enlightened guest on the next version of Microsoft Windows Server, code-named Longhorn, using the Windows Server virtualisation technology. They will also be able to host Windows Server Longhorn as a paravirtualised guest on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, using the Xen virtualisation technology embedded in the Linux operating system.

The necessary software components will be released throughout 2007. Intel has committed to providing paravirtualised network and block device drivers that will allow Windows Server 2000/2003/XP to run unmodified in Xen virtual environments on SUSELinux Enterprise Server 10. The drivers will let customers migrate to newer and fewer energy-efficient servers, consolidating legacy Windows or Linux implementations onto virtual servers.

'With our SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 platform launch in July 2006, Novell became the first major Linux distributor to integrate Xen virtualisation into a Linux distribution,'said Jeff Jaffe, Novell executive vice president and chief technology officer. 'In September, we became the first distribution to support virtualised Linux workloads on Xen, and today we are the first distributor to support virtualised Windows workloads on Linux.

Turning to Web services-based management, Microsoft and Novell are working to make it easier for users to manage mixed Windows and SUSE Linux Enterprise physical and virtual environments by collaborating on standards-based, scalable and flexible solutions.

Novell is working with the open-source community to develop an open implementation of the Web Services for Management (WS-Management). WS-Management supports the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), which develops platform-independent and technology-neutral standards for systems management of IT installations both within enterprises and across the Internet. Novell ZENworks Orchestrator and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 will incorporate WS-Management this year.

Standards-based protocols will also be deployed to improve directory and identity interoperability between Microsoft and Novell products and technologies, in order to improve access control for IT resources managed with either Novell eDirectory or Microsoft Active Directory.

The two companies will develop a series of demonstrations that focus on interoperability between technologies - a more detailed roadmap for this effort will be available in the first half of 2007.

Novell has also reiterated that later this month it will release translators for its version of the OpenOffice business software suite that will provide read and save support for Microsoft's new Open XML format, introduced in Office 2007.

At the start of February, Microsoft announced its first Open XML/ODF Translator the 2007, XP and 2003 versions of Office, though the forthcoming Novell translator is currently restricted to Word documents. Both companies have begun work on providing support for spreadsheets and presentations.

Jaffe said that the latest initiatives demonstrate the company's commitment to interoperability.

'The majority of our customers have mixed-source environments, and they want their platform vendors to take responsibility for making things work together,' he said. 'That's what our technical collaboration agreement with Microsoft is all about. We're working together to deliver true interoperability between Windows and SUSE Linux Enterprise, and we are standing together behind our products and our customers.'