Microsoft Certifies Red Hat on Hyper-V

Earlier this year Microsoft and Red Hat announced that they had agreed to begin working on a joint initiative to certify each others virtualization and operating system platforms; this was received with much excitement in the technical communities around the web. IT shops need the ability to continue with server consolidation efforts, but were forced to keep RHEL builds on dedicated hardware since it was not supported on Hyper-V. Recently, Red Hat was only certified and supported as a guest when running on VMware and this had an impact on some shops in their virtualization selection criteria since REHL played an important role in their datacenter. However, change is finally here.

Last week Microsoft officially announced that it had completed the certification initiative with Red Had to certify and support RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) v5.2, 5.3 and 5.4 on Hyper-V as a VM guest. Also, Red Hat as part of the initiative has announced they are now supporting Windows Server 2003, 2008 and 2008 R2 running as VM guest on their KVM virtualization solution.

Datacenters running Microsoft Hyper-V were faced with a challenge since only Windows OS's were support and no support for Red Hat was provided. This will provide Hyper-V adopters the ability to maintain business continuity requirements for meeting both Windows and Linux needs in supported guest configurations and maintaining a smaller physical foot print.