Microsoft and Red Hat have now consummated vows to love and cherish each other's operating systems on their corresponding hypervisors.

The interoperability pact was inked in February of this year, leading the companies to "synchronize testing" in counterpart validation programs over the months. Starting today, businesses can mix and mingle Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux on visualized environments with joint support from Microsoft and Red Hat.

Windows Server 2003, 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2, meanwhile, have been validated to run on RHEL 5.4 using the KVM hypervisor.

To run RHEL on Windows, customers must have a a Red Hat Enterprise Linux license, using RHEL 5.x guests, for support from Red Hat. To run Windows Server on RHEL, customers can either have a support agreement for Windows Server 2008, or pay per-call for Microsoft support.

Red Hat in the announcement once again assures the open-source community that its virtualization alliance with Microsoft covers coordinated technical support using server validations only, and does not include any patent or open source licensing rights. It also claims no money passed hands other than standard certification and validation testing fees.

The companies say all Windows applications certified on Windows Server and Red Hat applications certified on RHEL are supported in the mixed visualized environment. Future versions of products from both firms will also be validated under the agreement. ®

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