Red Hat recently announced that customers can deploy supported server virtualization environments that combine Microsoft and Red Hat server operating systems. This partnership has been in the works since February when they announced their agreement to collaborate on virtualization solutions for customers using both Microsoft and Red Hat operating systems.

This virtualization partnership announcement came out on the same day as the Red Hat Analyst day where they gather industry and financial analysts together with Red Hat executives to talk about the performance of the company. Stephen O’Grady from RedMonk and Gordon Haff from CNet both had nice summaries of the analyst event if you want to learn more about Red Hat’s strategy and performance.

According to the Red Hat press release, the virtualization certification includes:

• Validation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, using the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, with Windows Server 2003, 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 guests.
• Certification of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 host with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4 guests.

From ZDNet, Paula Rooney’s take on this announcement is that “time’s are a changing. Microsoft and Red Hat delivering anything in cooperative fashion is big news and marks more major milestones for interoperability, virtualization and Linux.”

. Read the rest at Intel.com.