Posted by Sandy Gupta
General Manager of Marketing, Open Solutions Group

As I mentioned in my blog last month, I’ve been on the road quite a bit this year to meet Hosters and Service Providers around the World.

We’ve already made some appreciable gains, and during my keynote at OSBC tomorrow morning I will share the expansion of our interoperability plans to community Linux. Specifically, effective immediately, Microsoft will support Windows Server2008 R2 Hyper-V to run CentOS.  CentOS is a popular Linux distribution for Hosters, and this was the number one requirement for interoperability that we heard from that community.

This development enables our Hosting partners to consolidate their mixed Windows + Linux infrastructure on Windows Server Hyper-V; reducing cost and complexity, while betting on an enterprise class virtualization platform. I want to thank the Microsoft Open Source Technology Center for the work they have done with the community to make this possible.

Within tomorrow morning’s keynote, my colleague Fabio Cunha and I will also demonstrate the cross-platform architecture of Microsoft’s Private Cloud. We will show implementation that supports multiple hypervisors and delivers a platform for the transformation of a heterogeneous IT infrastructure into an automated mixed source Cloud infrastructure. Fabio will show demos of various cross-platform capabilities of System Center Operations Manager, System Center Orchestrator, and also how customers can use a single pane of glass to deploy patches and updates across Windows and Linux Servers.  If you would like more information, drop us a line at osginfo@microsoft.com.

Microsoft continues to work on becoming more open in how we develop solutions, work with the open source communities, and how we’re making mixed source solutions a reality for businesses as they transition to the Cloud.  (See more on work being done towards cloud computing from this week’s TechEd in Atlanta).

Clearly, there’s more to be done especially as we think about the evolution of Cloud architectures and the growth of IT in emerging markets. We like to think that we have a mature IT ecosystem today, but in many ways, it is still in its infancy and there is a lot more scope of IT Automation is the promise of the cloud. Technologies continue to emerge and evolve. Innovation cycles are becoming shorter. Businesses are increasingly dependent on, and demanding of, their IT resources. There are many challenges – and opportunities – ahead of us. Competition is healthy, but collaboration will be the tide that raises all boats.  I look forward to continue reporting on these efforts going forward

In the meantime, I look forward to meeting as many of you as possible at OSBC and finding out how we can help you. Drop me a line, sandeeg@microsoft.com, or come by our pavilion.