A few weeks ago I had the pleasure to be the first person from Microsoft to keynote a Linux World conference. Although the concept  may sound unusual, I’ve been attending Linux World conferences from the start and I have had technical speaking sessions in the past, both when I was with IBM and also last Summer at Linux World San Francisco. However, being invited to do a keynote at Linux World was exciting and I thought I would walk through my presentation here. The title was “Interoperability: Dealing with the Diversity and Heterogeneity of Today's IT Marketplace”
When I walked on-stage the audio/video guys at the convention center played the Rolling Stones ‘Start me up’, also known as the Windows 95 launch music, which got a few chuckles – I thought it was funny, at least.
I started with a little self-deprecating humor, showing how the Microsoft team came out as the ‘Evil Empire’ in last Summer’s Linux World Golden Penguin bowl (the insane looking stormtrooper in the middle is me) where we, the ‘Nerds’, faced the ‘Geeks’ (a team from Google) in a trivia contest.
After confessing that I was a little tall for a stormtrooper, I then continued along, talking about our OSS labs, the charter for the lab and the machines and software we use there. And we employ a team of great OSS experts, from all different backgrounds (affectionately known as the ‘penguins’ internally).
I then talked about the history of interoperability, from the silo’ed stacks on the 80’s (IBM, NEC, HP, Digital) to the massive amount of choice available today at all levels of the IT stack: 
It’s important to frame up where interoperability is needed – as we all know there is no universal ‘interoperability layer’ where everything just magically works together, so it’s important to clarify the architectural level’s where we need interoperability and also what things need interoperability between them: 
I then showed a video of the interoperability work we are doing with JBoss. But rather than show vendor talking heads, I showed how one of our mutual customers was using JBoss on Windows server.  Format: wmv
Duration: 03:24
Download in MPEG4 I spent some time talking about managing mixed environments, which is also covered in more depth here and here.
I always like to get into the contentious parts of the Microsoft/Linux debate, it keeps it exciting, so I showed a slide with Linux running on Windows: 
Which is simply Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 – not really that ‘shocking’ but it keeps the audience awake. I then explained the work we are doing with supporting Linux on Virtual Server 2005 and that, in addition to the announcement that Virtual Server 2005 would be a free download, we are also announcing Virtual Machine additions for Linux guests as a free download. These virtual machine additions help Linux guests run more effectively in Virtual Server 2005 (video, mouse improvements, clock and heartbeat synchronization).
The other main point I made was that we are announcing Microsoft Product Support for Linux distributions running as guest OSes on Virtual Server 2005: 
Which is something we run in our lab in a fairly big way, below are some screenshots of the management interface showing the various Linux distributions running as guests on Virtual Server 2005 (not all the version you see below are part of our formal support described above – but they run just fine for us). We run about twenty different Linux distributions on Virtual Server 2005 on a 4-way Opteron HPDL585 system with 8GB memory. 
We had a lot to talk about around Virtualization, and one of the areas I discussed in the keynote that I think is really compelling is our news with XenSource, and many other partners, on the use of the Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format as the default format for storing Windows virtual machines. XenSource licensed the VHD format which gives them the ability to run and store Windows virtual machine images on Xen enabled technologies, such as their XenEnterprise product.
These announcements in total are significant for the current and future interoperability between Windows and Linux virtual machine images. I know from our experiences in the OSS labs with these virtualization technologies, that there will be many powerful new scenarios for IT environments in the future, such as new models for server consolidation and backup/disaster recovery systems.
Moving on from virtualization, I then discussed some of the Unix interoperability technologies we have in Windows Server 2003 R2. Called the Subsystem for Unix Applications (SUA), which Jason Zions discusses in depth here on Port25.
Another new area for Microsoft is high performance computing (HPC) – a domain near and dear to me as I spent a lot of time working with Linux clusters while I was at IBM. Many of the HPC systems in the market today run Linux or Unix, so since we’re launching a new product called the Microsoft Windows Server Compute Cluster Edition, I thought it would be cool to show how our new product interoperated with a Linux-based HPC cluster. Dr. Michael Athanas from The BioTeam (a genomic research software company) came up on-stage to demonstrate their tool, called iNquiry, accessing both a Linux cluster (based in the Boston Data Center) and a Windows Cluster (which was on the stage). The on-stage machine was a RocketCalc box – a 4-node, 8 CPU box made in Kent, Ohio. The core of the demo was executing side-by-side queries on genomic sequences against both clusters, launched from a scientific logbook in Excel. As Dr. Athanas said, “As a researcher, what matters to me is that I have the scientific computing power available when I need it, and that the data comes back in a usable form – not what flavor the back-end system is.” Given the complex data analysis associated with the genomics project, having familiar, easy-to-use tools like Excel to seamlessly interact with HPC resources is a significant step forward for end-users. After this demo – which was very cool IMHO – I jumped into a more philosophical discussion on the evolution of applications and the role of standards in interoperability. The key points here were about the difference between physical standards (such as the railroad gauge standards for railroad tracks) and the world of software standards. Because of the pliability of software, we can adapt standards in a market-driven process versus creating de jeure standards too early in the evolution of a technology which can limit the progress and innovation of software.
This is happening right now, and I showed a few examples of this market-driven standardization – mashups. By illustrating some of the creative work happening by developers using map services (Google Map, MSN Virtual Earth) and other data services, mashing up new apps based on the utilization of Web services and other standards, we can see real-time market-driven standardization – data and formats being translated between systems and services and aggregation by developers and authors around emerging standards. Two of my favorites, one using National Park data and MSN Virtual Earth with Atlas and one using Google maps and SMS messages through cell phones at GarbageScout.com:
I then finished the presentation with an overview on how we compete and collaborate in different areas (JBoss, IBM, Oracle, SugarCRM, etc.). I announced this site, Port25, and then gave some reflections based on my experience in OSS over the past thirteen years, primarily focusing on the evolution and maturation of the commercial and open source marketplace.
All in all, I was happy with how it all turned out and I hope the audience enjoyed the talk as well – I know I enjoyed delivering it. That’s an overview of my Linux World keynote and although I really don’t prefer typing and pictures versus talking through these ideas, I thought it would be useful to put this up on Port25. Let me know what you think. | Sample Pictures of the Open Source Lab. Click to Enlarge. 
We also run a few operating systems in the lab:
- Solaris 9,10
- Java Desktop System
- AIX5L 5.1
- RHEL4 AS & ES & WS (32 & 64-bit)
- RHEL3 AS & ES (32 & 64-bit)
- RHEL2.1 AS (32-bit)
- RedHat 9 (and earlier)
- Fedora Core 2-5
- SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 (UnitedLinux 1.0)
- SuSE Linux Standard Server 8
- SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, 10
- OpenSuSE
- Novell Open Enterprise Server
- Windows Server 2003 (32 & 64-bit) all versions and SPs
- Windows XP (SP1, SP2)
- Windows 2000 Server
- Windows Vista Beta 1, Beta 2
- Mandrake Linux 10
- FreeBSD 5.2.1
- FreeBSD R4.1
- LinuxFromScratch 6.0
- Gentoo
- Asianux
- Freedows Std 04
- Rocks 3.3.0
- Arch Linux 0.7
- Ark Linux 2005.1 SR1
- Crux Linux 2.1
- Debian (buzz – sarge)
- Foresight Linux 0.8
- Libranet 2.8.1
- Mandriva 2005LE
- MEPIS 3.3.1-1
- NetBSD 1.6.2
- OpenBSD 3.5
- OpenSolaris
- Slackware 10.1
- SuSE Pro 9.0, 9.1, 9.3
- Tinysofa 2.0
- TurboLinux 10
- Ubuntu 5.04
- Vector Linux 5.0.1 Vida Linux 1.1
- MacOS X
|