Suse Linux and Windows will become more closely integrated next week, when Novell releases a product allowing Microsoft management tools to monitor the open source operating system.
Novell said in a statement on Wednesday that joint sales of Linux support certificates over the past six months have increased, which the company ascribes to the current uncertain economic conditions.
Novell and Microsoft have been collaborating on interoperability since 2007, when the two companies opened the Microsoft/Novell Interoperability Lab. At that time, Microsoft also agreed to become a reseller of Suse Linux, investing US$240 million in certificates for Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) support and maintenance.
As part of the deal, Microsoft agreed to extend legal indemnity to Suse Linux customers, in the event that Linux technologies were found to infringe on Microsoft's intellectual property.
Novell said the two companies had signed up more than 100 new customers to Suse Linux over the past six months, doubling the rate of the first two years of the relationship. In total, the companies have sold US$200m of SLES maintenance certificates to 300 customers, Novell said.
The interoperability lab's latest product is the Suse Linux Enterprise Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, which will allow Microsoft System Center Operations Manager R2 users to monitor both Linux and Windows systems through one console.
The management pack, which will ship on 19 June, was originally announced in November 2008, on the occasion of the second anniversary of the Microsoft-Novell agreement.
Other projects having come out of the interoperability centre include a beta-test version of Moonlight, a browser add-on that allows Silverlight content to play on Linux systems. Silverlight is Microsoft's Web-based interactive content delivery platform, competing with products such as Adobe's Flash Player.
The two companies also worked to make SLES 11 run at "near-native" performance levels on Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor, Novell said at SLES 11's release in March. A hypervisor is software allowing multiple operating systems to run as virtual machines on a single hardware platform.
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