Citrix has signed a definitive agreement to acquire XenSource.  XenSource and Microsoft announced 12 months to provide interoperability between Xen and Viridian (aka: Windows Server Virtualization).

Now I don’t necessarily see the problem here, Citrix have extended core Microsoft functionality for quite some time now — bringing out the best/worst competitive nature in both sides.  …but this post isn’t about me, it’s about Microsoft and interoperability with Xen/Linux.

Linux at Microsoft isn’t new.  There are hundreds of physical and virtual servers running multiple distributions of Linux, at Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab.  Sam Ramji (Director for the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft) presented at OSCON, the Open Source Conference recently in San Francisco.  His session was on the work that Microsoft  is doing with Novell, XenSource, and others on Linux and Windows interoperability; focusing on the next-generation datacenter: virtualization, systems management, and identity.

So be sure to check out his slide deck from his session, “Linux and Windows Interoperability On the Metal and On the Wire” — and the comments at the end of his post.  A snippet is below:

Q: How does the acquisition of Xensource by Citrix fall into Microsoft’s virtualization plans?

A: This is a positive event for Microsoft’s virtualization work and our partnerships with both XenSource and Citrix.  I’ve already been in contact with XenSource who have confirmed that this just takes a pair of existing strong technology relationships and adds Citrix’s sales and marketing engine to XenSource’s products.  We’ll continue with the joint engineering that we’ve been working on - establishing interoperability of Linux on Windows, promoting a common virtual hard disk format (VHD) and driving standards for management in this area.

It also demonstrates both how early the virtualization market is - there are many millions of servers still not virtualized, and that the demand for heterogenous virtualization management is very strong.  Overall I see this as very positive.

Anyway, where am I going with this?  What happens now?  Well this is where I sign off with a small rant, umm I mean wish.  I’m not sure what happens, but I am certain that Crazy Roller Coaster Ride, is still getting started.  So bring on that interoperability, give me management, give me the tools, give me sinfully easy backups. …Most importantly give me a community, channel, partnership and resources that I need to build a solution I can manage.  Not a solution that just breeds more problems, gives me back more than the 80% value for the 20% of resources I put in to maintain it!