We’ve announced this week the opening of the Microsoft and Novell Interoperability Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With this announcement we can now talk about the work that’s been underway at the lab since the beginning of summer.
The lab itself is well equipped. It consists of 2500 square feet and contains over 80 servers. The servers are x86-based, dual-core and quad-core systems with hardware virtualization technology enabled and our storage area network has terabytes of capacity. Here’s a look at the lab layout.
For now, we’re focused on testing three areas of interoperability. The first is virtualization, where we’re intent on validating the interoperability of SLES running on Windows Server virtualization and Windows Server 2008 running on Xen. This is a development lab, so we’re running current bits from the development organizations at both Microsoft and Novell. We’re part of the integrated development teams at both companies and are actively involved in the testing process for pre-released software.
Our second area of focus is web-services management. We are currently working with the development teams at both Microsoft and Novell to identify the test cases we want to use to validate client-server implementations of the web-services management protocol from both companies. Our third area of interest is identity federation where our planning for the lab is just now getting underway.
Those of us who work at the lab have strived over the past few months to create an environment that is not strictly Microsoft and not strictly Novell. We’ve successfully created a unique entity, a development lab, at which there resides a single team of engineers whose individuals are involved in and supportive of each others’ work. We’ve pushed both companies to share resources and pushed their boundaries of openness. I’m excited to be part of this team. I look forward to working with my colleagues at the lab and to identify more areas of common interest for us to pursue.