Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Sam Ramji, Interop

Releasing the Linux Integration Component Drivers...

Sam Ramji — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:38:00 GMT

Microsoft on Monday contributed the Linux Integration Component drivers to the Linux community for the reasons stated in our release. Microsoft chose the GPLv2 license for the mutual benefit of our customers, partners, the community, and Microsoft.

Microsoft's decision was not based on any perceived obligations tied to the GPLv2 license. For business reasons and for customers, we determined it was beneficial to release the drivers to the kernel community under the GPLv2 license through a process that involved working closely with Greg Kroah-Hartman, who helped us understand the community norms and licensing options surrounding the drivers.

The primary reason we made this determination in this case is because GPLv2 is the preferred license required by the Linux community for their broad acceptance and engagement. For us to participate in the Linux Driver Project, GPLv2 was the best option that allowed us to enjoy the tremendous offer of community support. The community's response even within a few hours of posting the code was welcoming and we appreciate it greatly.

We arrived at the decision to release the drivers to the community under the GPLv2 through this process. Both Greg K-H and Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation have reiterated that this is the same process that other companies follow when deciding how to release new device drivers to the Linux community.

We are looking forward to the positive collaboration and acceptance that has marked the vast majority of our interactions with customers and community members regarding this important project.

Cheers,

Sam

Updated 7/25/2009 @ 11:54 AM Pacific: Dave Roberts of Vyatta posted a blog entry rebutting recent cloims that we were accused of a licensing violation with some detail on the technical issues.

Microsoft Releases Device Driver Code to the Linux Community

Peter Galli — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:48:00 GMT

In what many may see as a surprising move, Microsoft today released 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community under the popular General Public Licence v2.

The code includes three Linux device drivers, and has been submitted to the Linux kernel community for inclusion in the Linux tree.

The drivers will be available to both the Linux community and customers, and will enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.

In an article posted to Microsoft's PressPass site, Tom Hanrahan, director of Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center, notes that this is a significant milestone because it's the first time the company has released code directly to the Linux community. "Additionally significant is that we are releasing the code under the GPLv2 license, which is the Linux community's preferred license," he said.

In the same article, Sam Ramji, senior director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft, points out that Microsoft communities and open source communities are growing together, which is ultimately of benefit to customers. An example of this is the Linux community, which has built a platform used by many customers. "So our strategy is to enhance interoperability between the Windows platform and many open source technologies, which includes Linux, to provide the choices our customers are asking for," he said.

Ramji also alluded to the fact that people are often surprised when they hear how much open source community and development work is happening across Microsoft, which is largely due to the fact that these collaborations focus more on getting the work done and engaging with the various communities on a one-to-one basis and less about promoting them.

One example of how Microsoft participates with, and contributes to, open source is its relationship with the PHP Community. The company's involvement includes contributing to the PHP Engine, optimizing PHP 5.3 to perform strongly on Windows, and working to improve the performance of numerous PHP applications on Windows. Then there is the ongoing participation in various Apache Software Foundation projects, such as Hadoop, Stonehenge and QPID.

"In short, we're focused on building sustainable business strategies for open source at Microsoft ... we see open source playing into three key areas, one of which is the use of 'inbound' open source and the open source development model to make our software development processes more efficient."

"Good examples of this include what we did recently with jQuery in Visual Studio 2008, the implementation of OpenPegasus connectors and adaptors into System Center Operations Manager, and work that the Microsoft High Performance Computing team did with the Argonne National Lab (ANL) to source its MPICH2 implementation, which is a portable implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) used in cluster computing and super computers," Ramji said.

We'll be posting a number of other articles on the release of the device driver code to the Linux community over the week, several of which will be penned by Hank Janssen from Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center, so look out for those.

The Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit

Peter Galli — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

A lot has been written by the press and blogosphere since the Linux Foundation's annual Collaboration Summit was held earlier this month, particularly about the panel that included Microsoft's Sam Ramji, Sun Microsystems' Ian Murdock, and Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin.

The panel was entitled "Why Can't We All Just Get Along," which struck me as not only divisive, but also a little outdated given the level of collaboration that already takes place between proprietary and open source software vendors alike.

For example, Microsoft and Sun already have a long-standing working collaborative relationship; Microsoft also has a technical collaboration agreement with Novell, an agreement with Red Hat to test and validate our respective server operating systems running on one another's hypervisors, and a number of arrangements in place with other open source companies.

The panel discussed this in greater depth, looking at how collaboration, cooperation and competition exist: not just between proprietary and open software vendors, but also between Linux and open source ones.

This prompted panel moderator Zemlin to suggest that the three make an even greater effort come together and collaborate where it makes sense.

Interestingly, the Summit also spurred renewed discussion about whether there need to be more critics in the Linux community, with one blogger taking Zemlin to task for what he described as the "tall claims" he made at the Summit.

Ramji, the Senior Director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft, also used the panel to remind the Linux and open source communities of his offer for them to reach out to him and others within Microsoft and share their frustrations, problems and issues, so that they could be better educators and advocates on this front across the company.

Ramji also, again, stressed that Microsoft's customers want interoperability with open source software, including for PHP on Windows, but that making this happen sometimes took time.

Sun's Murdock seconded this, talking about internal inertia and how Sun also had had to deal with hearing from customers and developers that they wanted interoperability with technologies other than their own.

At Microsoft, there are cross-group, company-wide open source discussions and initiatives underway, with each group given the autonomy to decide for itself how this plays out with regard to their product set and business model.

While Port 25's mission is to be the voice of the open source community at Microsoft, it is far from the only voice on this topic. There have been blogs across the company on open and interoperability initiatives, from groups including security, Live and the Mac Business Unit, to name just a few.

It is also important to remember that Ramji and other executives like Bob Muglia, the president of Microsoft's Server & Tools business, have often said that open source is a journey that Microsoft is on and that much more needs to still be done. Many groups across the company are already responding to that call.

Open Source Interoperability Projects

Jean Paoli — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 07:21:00 GMT

Interoperability has always been a focus area at Microsoft. Being a platform company, Microsoft has engaged in interoperability at many levels - product features, participation in standardization bodies, publishing many technologies under open licenses and working closely with customers, governments and partners to understand the heterogeneous IT landscape and discuss practical interoperability solutions.

Earlier this year, these activities were formalized under the Interoperability Principles for all of our high-volume products.

I am the General Manager of Interoperability Strategy at Microsoft, and I have worked across the company on many interop initiatives. I am happy to see many interop projects now coming out of Microsoft and, personally, having many of them based on XML makes me doubly happy.

My team has built several bridging technologies and solutions for many of our products to enable interoperability. These are being run as open source projects and released under a broad BSD license so that our customers and partners can use them in many open and broad scenarios.

Interoperability has been getting enhanced attention at a lot of conferences lately and Microsoft has also upped its participation at many open source conferences such as OSCON, the Eclipse Conference and ApacheCon.

At Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference last month, the interoperability story was part of almost every announcement and keynote address. As Sam Ramji writes in his latest blog, Microsoft is also participating at ApacheCon and highlighting the interoperability work we are doing. These are indeed exciting times!

On the interoperability front, my team has been working with the WSO2 since the TechEd 2007 Conference to demonstrate interoperability using our StockTrader reference application.

This week, the WSO2 proposed a new Apache incubation project, known as Stonehenge, to further this work. The aim of this project is to set up sample applications to demonstrate interoperability with multiple underlying platform technologies by using currently defined W3C and OASIS standard protocols. We look forward to working with WS02 on the scope of this project, and having discussions with the community.

I also want to highlight some open source interoperability projects that my team has been working on with third parties, companies and members of the community at large, which may be very relevant to the readers of this blog.

Eclipse Tools for Silverlight

Eclipse4sl allows Java developers to develop code for the Silverlight platform within the Eclipse development environment, and contains both an advanced project system for creating Silverlight applications and media experiences as well as a compiler for packaging Silverlight applications for deployment.

Interoperability with the Azure Services platform

Announced at PDC recently, the Azure Services Platform is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. It provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. Microsoft .NET Services is a key component of the Azure Services Platform that offers a set of Microsoft-hosted, highly scalable, developer-oriented services that provide the key building blocks, like, Access Control, Service Bus, and Workflow service.

The Azure Services Platform, built from the ground up to be consistent with Microsoft's commitment to openness and interoperability and in that spirit, we have built two cross-platform SDKs for .NET services - for Java and Ruby.

Information Cards Interoperability

Windows CardSpace is Microsoft implementation of Information Cards on the Windows platform. Information cards are a core part of Identity Metasystem and help both site owners and visitors to manage, control, and exchange digital identities more safely and consistently.

We have also built four open source projects that help Web developers support information cards on diverse platforms:

OpenXML-ODF translators

The goal of this project is to provide translators to allow for interoperability between applications based on ODF (OpenDocument) standard and Office Open XML standard. The translator is based on XSLT transformations between two XML formats, along with some pre- and post-processing, and is available on Sourceforge under a BSD-like license.

OpenXML-UOF translators

The goal of this project is to provide translators to allow for interoperability between applications based on UOF (Uniform Office Format) standard and Office Open XML standard.

UOF is an emerging standard, which is being developed by the Chinese Office Software Work Group (COSWG), led by the China Electronics Standard Institute (CESI), the Ministry of Information Industry (MII), major suppliers of Chinese office software suites, and other academic institutions.The translator is based on XSLT transformations between two XML formats, along with some pre- and post-processing. It is available at SourceForge under a BSD-like license

I would like to hear your comments and feedback on these projects and also welcome open engagement on what Microsoft should be doing for interoperability. Tell us what other interoperability scenarios we should be looking to address.

I also want to thank the multiple third party companies and the community members we cooperate with, as well as the members of my team: Vijay Rajagopalan, Sumit Chawla, Kamaljit Bath, Claudio Caldato, Jean-Christophe Cimetiere and many others for working on these projects and building technical solutions for interoperability with key Microsoft products and technologies.

struct.new("future", :open, :microsoft)

Sam Ramji — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:49:00 GMT

I delivered the keynote at ApacheCon in New Orleans today, where I talked about some of the new milestones we have chalked up on the journey inside Microsoft towards greater participation and growth with open source communities, and our strategy of "architecting for participation."

This strategy focuses on four significant themes: community; contribution; partnerships; and choice. Microsoft believes that the next ten years of software will be a time of growth and change where both open source and Microsoft communities will grow together.

We also believe that in an increasingly interconnected world, where more people have a greater opportunity to use more technology to do more things than ever before. We support those choices and are expanding interoperability between open source technologies and Microsoft technologies.

So, on the interoperability front, we have been working with the WS02 since our TechEd 2007 Conference, to demonstrate interoperability using our StockTrader reference application. Today, the WS02 announced they would build an open source version of the sample application under "Project Stonehenge," which hs been proposed as a new Apache incubation project.

WS02 will use the project to set up sample applications that demonstrate seamless interoperability across multiple underlying platform technologies, using currently defined W3C and OASIS standard protocols.

My team has been working closely with that of Jean Paoli, the General Manager of Interoperability Strategy at Microsoft, whose team is driving much of this interoperability work. You can read more about all this in Jean's blog post.

Microsoft has also decided to move the development of protocol parsers for Microsoft Network Monitor - a free protocol analyzer and network sniffer - to an open source model, on CodePlex, which will host the development of parsers for public protocols and for protocols described in our Open Protocol Specifications for Windows.

An updated parser package has been released and a source tree created on Codeplex. We want Netmon to be the best-of-breed tool for network monitoring at Microsoft, not just for Windows.

Microsoft also recently joined the AMQP Working Group as a participant, with the goal of contributing towards the development of the specification and to enable greater customer choice in the marketplace.

At the request of community members, we have now committed to participate in the Apache Qpid project, a widely adopted open source implementation of the AMQP specification that addresses the customer need for choice and improved messaging interoperability.

Our customers are telling us that they would like to see the Apache Qpid project extended to interoperate with Windows, so the next few months of participation will be focused on understanding the community's effort to build Windows based AMQP software.

Participation will give us the opportunity to learn from other project participants, so that we can be in a position to consider making a valuable contribution. But it is important to note that the Apache Qpid project is just one of many AMQP specification implementations, and we are open to supporting additional projects.

You can read an interesting technical research paper from Ohio State University analyzing the performance of the Qpid implementation of AMQP here.

Microsoft also announced, at PDC 2008, our commitment to include "Oslo" - an upcoming set of technologies for modeling - in the Open Specification Promise. This will ensure that the "Oslo" declarative modeling language, codenamed "M", is interoperable with prominent industry standards such as WS* specifications, XML formats, industry protocols, and security standards.

Two of the core focuses for Oslo are integration and interoperability. As such, it will integrate with next-gen Microsoft technologies, including System Center, Visual Studio and BizTalk Sever. We also plan to work with partners and the industry, so as to make Oslo interoperable with important standards and industry protocols.

One of the key ways we think customers will achieve customization for their platforms is through the use of textual and visual DSLs, which can be written uniquely by the developer for vertical industries and specific domains, or they can use pre-existing DSLs in these same scenarios.

The hope is that we will establish a broad and open ecosystem around "M" that will enable customers to bring the power of model-driven applications and systems to their heterogeneous environments.

Finally, on the Live Search front, the Powerset team recently resumed its participation with HBase, which is elated to infrastructural storage technology enabling large scale data processing.

The HBase project receives significant lift from the active community that supports the project, and Powerset's continued participation on HBase could allow us to accelerate the integration of Powerset's technology into Live Search, resulting in improvements to the end-user experience.

So, stay posted. There's a lot more to come!

Opening Day: Azure Platform Debuts

Sam Ramji — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Today at PDC in Los Angeles, Ray Ozzie unveiled the Azure Services Platform, which will enable developers to build the next generation of applications - spanning all the way from the cloud to the enterprise data center. My team's focus has been on making sure that this platform treats open source development technologies as first-class citizens.

A key components of the Azure Services Platform is Windows Azure, an infrastructure that provides core capabilities such as virtualized computation, scalable storage, and automated service management. Developers will be able to build or extend parts or complete service-based applications using Live Services, .Net Services and SQL Services.

They will also be able to choose from a range of open source development tools and technologies, and be able to access Azure services using a variety of common internet standards, including HTTP, REST, WS* and Atom.

The Azure platform's goal is to support all developers and their choice of IDE, language and technology. We are also providing programmable components that can be consumed by other applications, and Microsoft is funding and sponsoring open source software development kits to enable Java and Ruby developers to take advantage of Azure.

This is significant as this is the first time we are delivering cross-platform software development kits at the same time as Microsoft Developer Network software development kits.

We are also funding these open source projects, under the BSD licensing model, in collaboration with Thoughtworks Inc. and Schakra Inc., and they will be run on open source portals RubyForge and SourceForge.

Much of this interoperability work was undertaken by Jean Paoli, the General Manager for Interoperability Strategy, and his team, including Vijay Rajagopalan, the Principal Architect for Interoperability Strategy, so a big thanks is due to them on this front.

In addition, as part of Microsoft's commitment to openness and working with open source communities, I asked the Open Source Technology Center (led by Tom Hanrahan) to come up with some specific examples that show how open source communities can access Windows Azure.

This work has allowed us to deliver several ‘proofs of concept' which show open source developers that they can create applications that run as services and have access to services in the cloud. These ‘proofs of concept' demonstrate that:

A developer using the Eclipse IDE can write a C# application that runs on Windows Azure
Gallery, the leading PHP photo application, can access Windows Azure cloud storage
A blog engine hosted on Windows Azure can authenticate users with OpenID.

Specific to Gallery, we've done two simple things: we created wrappers to convert the Windows Azure API to PHP objects, and we created a Windows Azure subclass inherited from the Windows NT Platform class. The net of all this is that, with a small amount of code, we were able to connect one of the top PHP application to Windows Azure, specifically, photo images stored as BLOBs in the cloud.

Finally, Microsoft is also going to publish the "M" language specification, including MSchema, MGrammar and MGraph, under the Open Specification Promise. This will facilitate the interoperability of the "Oslo" declarative modeling language, codenamed "M," with prominent industry standards such as WS* specifications, XML formats, industry protocols and security standards.

Stay tuned, because there's more to come.

Cheers,

Sam

Open Messaging

Sam Ramji — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 11:00:00 GMT

We've been working with a range of open source projects in the last few years, and each one has taught us something - both what to do more of, and what to change. One of the things we've learned in listening to very specific customer needs, is that there is an emerging pattern of shared software development that will drive changes in how companies buy vs. build software.

Messaging (and I mean enterprise messaging, rather than email) is an area that is of keen interest to customers like JP Morgan Chase and Credit Suisse. As they run their businesses on real-time messaging, they need to be deep experts, and drive changes in their messaging platforms to fit their business. Along with companies like Cisco, Novell, iMatix, RabbitMQ, WSO2, and Red Hat, these industry leaders have built a standard for ubiquitous messaging: AMQP.

The Advanced Message Queueing Protocol is an open specification supported by open source communities and currently implemented by Apache QPID, RabbitMQ, and OpenAMQ. The contributors established the AMQP Working Group as a body to manage the process of developing the specification.

It's my pleasure to announce that Microsoft has been invited to join the AMQP working group by the six founding members. We have committed to participate in the development of the specification and are keenly interested in the developing need for interoperability in enterprise messaging.

While message-based transports with security and transactional integrity are a vital infrastructure component throughout financial institutions, the AMQP specification and related implementations may also provide greater interoperability for a number of other vertical scenarios, including insurance and healthcare. AMQP specifies a wire-level protocol (think of a transport like TCP or HTTP) and FIX, FpML, SOAP, and other messages can be sent of AMQP in LAN and WAN environments.

I think it's particularly interesting to see this trend of industry-specific shared software and protocols. In the case of AMQP, the known implementations are open source (using MPL, BSD, GPLv3, and Apache licenses). In a sense the customer/end-user organizations involved in AMQP - competitors in their core business - are choosing to act as a technology keiretsu within a highly competitive industry.

Our work in AMQP will be consistent with the commitment to openness outlined in July. The AMQP Working Group requires a limited royalty-free patent licensing commitment from its members and, as a participant, we have agreed to grant royalty-free patent licenses on specified terms to implementers of the specification.

The AMQP Working Group is also not a formal standards-setting organization like ISO or a standards consortium such as the IETF, OASIS or the W3C, but rather a group of companies and organizations that have come together to develop a specification to improve interoperability for messaging solutions. Microsoft will help, as appropriate, the Working Group to take the AMQP standard specification to another standards-setting organization, should it decide to do so at a later stage.

So, in short, we hope to contribute to the development of the AMQP specification in ways that will promote interoperability for existing and new implementations.

Cheers,

Sam

Supernova

Sam Ramji — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:22:00 GMT

I’m writing this from EclipseCon in Santa Clara, California, where I’m going to announce the beginning of Microsoft’s collaborative work with the Eclipse Foundation.

This started about a year ago when I met Mike Milinkovich at an open source event (the Open Source Software Think Tank 2007) where we were seated at the same table, and assigned to discuss “key issues inhibiting the growth of open source”. We found we had pretty similar ways of looking at problems – I found Mike to be very pragmatic and straightforward in his thinking. That discussion led to a conversation about what we could do to help Eclipse developers building software for Windows.

At the same time, the CardSpace team at Microsoft was already working actively with the Higgins Project to establish a secure, interoperable framework for user identity on the web – an architecture known as the Identity Metasystem. Since the inception of Higgins, the CardSpace team has worked very closely with the Higgins team, providing them the protocol documentation they needed to be able to build an identity selector that is interoperable with CardSpace, as well as placing those protocol specifications under the OSP so that they knew that it was safe to do so. We share a commitment to building a user-centric, privacy-preserving, secure, easy-to-use identity layer for the Internet.

Currently, Higgins, Microsoft, and dozens of other companies and projects are in the midst of the third OSIS-sponsored user-centric identity interop, where we all try our code together, providing the data needed to improve both our implementations and the interoperability between them.

Among a range of other opportunities (which we’re still working on), we discovered that Steve Northover (the SWT team lead) had gotten requests to make it easy for Java developers to write applications that look and feel like native Windows Vista. He and a small group of developers built out a prototype that enables SWT to use Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). We’re committing to improve this technology with direct support from our engineering teams and the Open Source Software Lab, with the goal of a first-class authoring experience for Java developers.

This is exciting to me – as a Java developer in my prior life (as well as the first technical marketing manager for BEA’s WebLogic Workshop, now Apache Beehive) it just makes sense to enable Java on Windows. We started a collaborative effort with JBoss two years ago that continues to this day. At the end of the day, it’s all about the developer. There will be more to come from the conversations that Eclipse and Microsoft have begun, and I look forward to announcing those in the future as we have demonstrable technology results.

Cheers,
Sam

How open source has influenced Windows Server 2008

Sam Ramji — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:00:00 GMT

When I think about what works really well in open source development and technology, the following things stand out:

Modular architectures
You can find these wherever you see participation at scale – and often a rearchitecture to a more modular system precedes expanded participation. Great examples of this are Firefox, OpenOffice, and X11 – from both the historical rearchitecture and the increased participation that resulted. The Apache HTTP server and APR are good examples that have been modular for as long as I can recall.
Programming language agnostic
A given project uses a consistent language, but there are no rules on what languages are in scope or out of scope. Being open to more languages means opportunity to attract more developers – the diversity of PHP/Perl/Python/Java has been a core driver in the success of a number of projects including Linux.
Feedback-driven development
The “power user” as product manager is a powerful shift in how to build and tune software – and this class of users includes developers who are not committing code back, but instead submitting CRs and defects – resulting in a product that better fits its end users.
Built-for-purpose systems
Most frequently seen in applications of Linux, the ability to build a system that has just what is needed to fulfill its role and nothing else (think of highly customizable distributions like Gentoo or BusyBox, as well as fully custom deployments).
Sysadmins who write code
The ability of a skilled system administrator to write the “last mile” code means that they can make a technology work in their particular environment efficiently and often provide good feedback to developers. This is so fundamental to Unix and Linux environments that most sysadmins are competent programmers.
Standards-based communication
Whether the standard is something from the IETF or W3C, or simply the implementation code itself, where these are used projects are more successful (think of Asterisk and IAX2) and attract a larger ecosystem of software around them.

So where did we apply these ideas to the development of Windows Server 2008?

Modular architectures was applied in multiple areas, but the one that stands out most to me is Internet Information Server 7 (IIS7). IIS7 has been rearchitected for flexibility as 40 individual modules, enable more to be written by community developers or delivered as out-of-band releases. This has already enabled performance improvements and independent evolution, and I expect to see further enhancements.
Programming language agnostic is something we’ve delivered on with support for PHP on IIS7 and the enhancements to FastCGI (which can be used by any of the P* languages). We set a goal of having PHP certified on Windows Server 2008, and we’ve achieved that. We’ll continue to improve runtime, security, and manageability support for non-.NET languages and the applications that are built on them, as well as testing the full stacks of PHP-based applications running on Windows Server, IIS, and SQL Server.
Feedback-driven development based on developer and customer trials (RDPs, TAPs, and Betas in our process) led to a range of “feature completion” developments that connected different components – like connecting Windows Firewall with Active Directory central policy, and the end-to-end improvements in SMB 2.0. Features like the RODC (Read-Only Domain Controller) have become more and more solid through experience with early alpha and beta customer deployments, and requests to enforce things like BitLocker encryption of user disks from a central authority have achieved full support.
Built-for-purpose systems such as DNS, DHCP, file and web serving can be created through wizard-driven configuration thanks to Windows Server Core. The goal of having a minimum attack surface and a small hardware footprint, inspired by the capabilities mentioned above, yet achievable by a broad base of admins has been achieved. Additionally, this has created an opportunity for Windows admins to become much more knowledgeable about the low-level structure of the operating system.
Sysadmins who write code are first-class citizens in the PowerShell-driven infrastructure. We’ve increased Windows administrators’ opportunity to master the full surface area of WMI and demonstrate that mastery in reusable, low-level scripts. As we evolve this to support multiple language bindings and bash aliasing, this should become a comfortable home for highly skilled sysadmins.
Standards-based communication such as in CardSpace (with support for X.509, SAML, Kerberos tokens, and more) and the Web Services stack (not only are all 38 Web Services standard under the Open Specification promise, but our implementations have achieved a high level of interop with Apache’s Axis web services stack), and beta support for emerging standards like Xen virtualization represent a small subset of the standards built into Windows Server 2008.

Overall, we’ve learned and continue to learn from open source development principles. These are making their way into the mindset, development practices, and ultimately into the products we bring to market.

I’ve focused here on “what Microsoft has learned from Open Source” – and ironically, I’ve agreed to do a panel at OSBC on 3/25 with Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation on “what Open Source can learn from Microsoft”. As all of the different organizations in IT continue to evolve, we’ll learn from each others’ best practices and make increasingly better software. As in science, this incremental improvement will move all of us forward.

A Brief History of Open at Microsoft

Sam Ramji — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:06:00 GMT

Four years ago, we started the Linux Lab at Microsoft.
Two years ago, we established the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft.
One year ago, we initiated the Linux Interoperability Lab at Microsoft.

Yesterday, we announced the broadest change to the way the Microsoft builds software and works with open source communities and developers.

By now you’ve probably read the announcement – “Microsoft Makes Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability” and are wondering what it all means, and where it came from. In a nutshell, the documentation for the APIs, document formats, and protocols used in Windows Vista, the .NET Framework, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007 will be made publically available. All developers will be able to access the documentation with no need to sign a license or pay any fee.

We are also announcing the launch of the Open Source Interoperability Initiative – a framework that will let us consistently support community development teams who build implementations of these specs with labs, technical support, plugfests, and joint testing and development.

To me, it’s a logical progression from the work and learning we’ve done with the Mozilla Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, the Linux Foundation, the Apache Foundation, the Samba Project, MySQL, and PHP. We’ve learned how to make agreements with community projects – including those which lack a legal entity for formal agreements; how to deliver technical support; who to listen to; and how to prioritize our work. We have seen how positively developers and users respond to these kinds of collaborative efforts. This is reflected by the progression of our approach: the creation of the OSP (Open Specification Promise), the IECC (Interoperability Executive Customer Council), the IVA (Interoperability Vendor Alliance), the submission and approval of the Ms-RL and Ms-PL by the OSI, and the PFIF/Samba agreement and ongoing collaboration.

It’s also a major evolutionary step, and significant commitment for our engineering teams. Ray Ozzie says it best: “Customers need all their vendors, including and especially Microsoft, to deliver software and services that are flexible enough such that any developer can use their open interfaces and data to effectively integrate applications or to compose entirely new solutions. By increasing the openness of our products, we will provide developers additional opportunity to innovate and deliver value for customers.”

In order to meet these new and higher standards that we’re setting for ourselves, engineers will need to build public documentation of the new formats, protocols, and APIs they develop as they advance our products. For those of us who write (or have written) code, we realize that this is a significant additional phase to the development cycle: design the feature, specify the feature, implement and test it, then proof and test the documentation of the specification, build user documents and sign off on the whole thing.

Because we are a platform company first and foremost, it will be entirely worth the investment both due to the increased transparency to developers, and due to the expanded range of innovation that can be built on Microsoft technologies.

I think this is a great day not just for Microsoft, but for the software industry. And I thank the people who have helped us learn what it’s taken to get here – most notably Jeremy Allison, Matt Asay, Mike Schroepfer, Andi Gutmans, Jim Zemlin, Mike Milinkovich, Zack Urlocker, Marten Mickos, Andrew Tridgell, Miguel de Icaza and Stephen Walli. We will continue to look to their perspectives and advice as we continue down the open road.

Here are a few of the responses we’ve seen – and I’ll quote from the industry publications and blogs:

LWN.net: “The announcement is sweeping enough to make one check the calendar, but we are still a month and a week early for pranks. Microsoft is making available specifications for APIs and communication protocols for Exchange, Office, SQL Server, SharePoint, and others without requiring a license or royalty payments. They will indicate what patents they believe cover any of the protocols and "will license all of these patents on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, at low royalty rates." There may be lurking dangers, but it appears to be a sincere effort at providing interoperability.”

Matt Asay (Alfresco/The Open Road): “As a Microsoft admirer, critic, and competitor, I can't help but applaud the depth and breadth of this move ... All in all, a huge day for Microsoft. Will there be gaps in Microsoft's efforts? Undoubtedly. For one thing, it hasn't really made much progress on its covenant not to sue commercial open-source providers, despite what Ina writes. But I'm impressed that it's even bothering to try.”

Andi Gutmans (PHP/Zend): “I believe Microsoft has finally understood that their closed nature has significantly hindered the growth of their eco-system. In many ways the threat of Linux has by many been interpreted as a threat of open-source (wrongly so in my opinion) …. Microsoft is now enabling the open-source community to grow its contributor base around such technologies and significantly improve the delivered quality. As most open-source developers and users live in heterogeneous environments this will benefit many.”

Jeremy Allison (via The Register): "It's definitely a positive step. Doesn't mean any change for us [Samba] as we already had all these docs, and the promise not to sue is only for 'non-commercial' open source, which is a bit meaningless. But that's the same thing we had really (they're listing the patents etc.). At least everyone now gets access to the same info, which I'm very happy about. As for the rest, the devil is in the details. If they can follow through with this, the world will be a better place.”

Zack Urlocker (MySQL/Open Sources): “… even if it was legislated, it's still good for the industry. And it’s good for Microsoft customers. And ultimately, it's probably good for Microsoft to be more open. If Microsoft wants to attract the next generation of developers and users, they should take the hint: Open works.”

We recognize that the communities’ judgments of the significance of this announcement will be entirely based on the actions that follow. The optimistic undertone that I’ve seen so far suggests that we can make real progress.

We will report back frequently on the progress and details of this work – especially on the Open Source Interoperability Initiative – here on Port 25. This announcement is the starting point of the next phase of Microsoft’s work with open source, and as Port 25 readers know, we are here for the full marathon.

The interoperability principles are posted here: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/principles/default.mspx

If you're surprised, you're not paying attention

Sam Ramji — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 05:03:00 GMT

First, let me say thanks to Jeremy Allison and Andrew Tridgell for their decades of hard work and their optimism.

Back in March, Jeremy invited me to talk about Samba and Microsoft, and how we could work together. It turned out that our first opportunity to meet was actually at the annual Samba developers’ conference, SambaXP in Gottingen, Germany in late April. I spent three days there listening to the Samba Team's reports on work they were doing, their observations relating to Microsoft protocols, and at breakfast with Tridge, Jeremy, and other team members we established a potential roadmap for collaboration. Frankly, I think my commitments were viewed with disbelief by some but with cautious optimism by Tridge and Jeremy – as well as by Dan Shearer and by John Terpstra, a man of vision and entrepreneurial spirit.

I worked with legal and engineering teams at Microsoft once I returned from Germany, and over a few weeks in May I got consensus that we could help the Samba Team by delivering on the roadmap. This included donating software licenses (MSDN Premium subscriptions) to the core team, building a test bed and beginning to share testing tools, preserving the UNIX extensions in CIFS to ensure that the work Jeremy and Steve French were doing would continue to be compatible with Microsoft implementations, accepting Samba Team’s observed bugs in Microsoft’s CIFS implementation and vice versa, providing some technical support on CIFS questions, and sending Microsoft engineers to the CIFS Conference @ Google in September 2007.

About the same time, Tom Hanrahan of IBM’s Linux Technology Center and the OSDL joined my team at Microsoft. His experience in working with Linux – and with Tridge – made it clear that we could sustain the work required to support the roadmap. Apart from his three decades of software engineering and management, one of Tom’s greatest assets is his combination of patience and perseverance; we knew it would take time and progress would be slow, but worthwhile. We’re still early in the process of doing joint testing and engineering with the Samba Team, and have many milestones to achieve (for example, shared test suites & frameworks). Thanks to Tom’s work with key engineers and managers in the company, we have already made progress and are committed to the long term.

Based on the dialog we’d established with Tridge and Jeremy, when the European Commission published the terms that would satisfy them in regards to Microsoft protocols, I saw an opportunity to continue aligning our work with the Samba Team. The terms were good, but the Samba team wanted Microsoft to make some changes to fully conform with the existing practices of the Samba developer community. Jeremy and Tridge saw the opportunity as well, and thus began a 6+ week process of improving and correcting the agreement to arrive at terms that both dramatically expanded their access to protocol information and enabled the Team to continue developing Samba as they have in the past. Attorneys and technologists (always an odd combination) on both sides worked hard to refine the language and do so in a clear and cooperative way. The discussions were masterfully led by Microsoft’s GM of Protocol Programs, Craig Shank (ex-Lineo!) and Samba’s Andrew Tridgell.

Today the Samba Team announced that they’re satisfied with the agreement, and are taking a Work Group Server Protocol Program (WSPP) trade secret and copyright license. This will give them access to Microsoft specifications for the protocols in WSPP (such as file, print, and user and group administrative services) and allow the Samba Team to create, use, and distribute implementations. I expect that this will significantly improve the process of Samba development, and produce better quality interoperation between Windows and Linux/UNIX environments.

What this process has shown me is that if we focus on technology, and patient, diligent execution, we can make real progress together.

This is a historic moment, and one that I’m proud of. But it is only a moment, and now it’s time to get back to working on interoperability, one day at a time.

Cheers,

Sam

[PostIcon:28]

Silverlight on Linux

Sam Ramji — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 10:45:00 GMT

For those of you who have met Miguel de Icaza, you know right away what I mean when I say that he is one of the most energetic people I’ve ever met. Clearly, the whole Moonlight team (whom I haven’t met) would also qualify for this appellation – in roughly 21 days between May and June, they collectively built an alpha implementation of Silverlight on Linux, based on many pieces of the Mono codebase.

After a great deal of work between the Moonlight and .NET teams, we’re ready to formally announce that we (Microsoft and Novell) will be bringing Silverlight to Linux, fully supported and including application and media codec compatibility.

The expansion of the existing work between Microsoft and Novell to include support for Silverlight on all Linux platforms is a major step in the journey of interoperability that we are on. We’ve heard clearly from the community that a full cross-platform web development solution is not only Windows and Macintosh, but must include Linux. I think this is a big deal. While we’ve licensed media codecs before, this represents a fully heterogeneous implementation of a strategic client technology.

Here’s to a better web and support for all users. Hopefully this will help breed further productive conversations about what developers and users need, and in someone else’s famous words, we can all “just get along.”

Cheers,

Sam

Linux and Windows Interoperability: On the Metal and On the Wire

MichaelF — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 17:10:00 GMT

I had the opportunity to present at both OSCON in Portland and at LinuxWorld in San Francisco in the last three weeks – both O’Reilly and IDG were gracious enough to grant me a session on the work that Microsoft is doing with Novell, XenSource, and others on Linux and Windows interoperability.

Overall our focus is on three critical technology areas for the next-generation datacenter: virtualization, systems management, and identity. Identity in particular spans enterprise datacenters and web user experiences, so it’s critical that everyone shares a strong commitment to cross-platform cooperation.

Here are the slides as I presented them, with some words about each to give context, but few enough to make this post readable overall. I skipped the intro slides about the Open Source Software Lab since most Port 25 readers know who we are and what we do.

Why interoperability?

The market for heterogeneous solutions is growing rapidly. One visible sign of this is virtualization, an “indicator technology,” which by its nature promotes heterogeneity. Virtualization has become one of the most important trends in the computing industry today. According to leading analysts, enterprise spending on virtualization will reach $15B worldwide by 2009, at which point more than 50% of all servers sold will include virtualization-enabled processors. Most of this investment will manifest itself on production servers running business critical workloads.

Given the ever improving x86 economics, companies are continuing to migrate off UNIX and specialty hardware down to Windows and Linux on commodity processors.

So, why now?

First, customers are insisting on support for interoperable, heterogeneous solutions. At Microsoft, we run a customer-led product business. One year ago, we established our Interoperability Executive Customer Council, a group of Global CIOs from 30 top global companies and governments – from Goldman Sachs to Aetna to NATO to the UN. On the Microsoft side, this council is run by Bob Muglia, the senior vice president of our server software and developer tools division. The purpose of this is to get consistent input on where customers need us to improve interoperability between our platforms and others – like Linux, Eclipse, and Java. They gave us clear direction: “we are picking both Windows and Linux for our datacenters, and will continue to do so. We need you to make them work better together.”

Second, MS and Novell have established a technical collaboration agreement that allows us to combine our engineering resources to address specific interoperability issues.

As part of this broader interoperability collaboration, Microsoft and Novell technical experts are architecting and testing cross-platform virtualization for Linux and Windows and developing the tools and infrastructure necessary to manage and secure these heterogeneous environments.

I am often asked, “Why is the agreement so long?” as well as “Why is the agreement so short?” The Novell-Microsoft TCA is 5 years mutual commitment. To put this in context, 5 years from now (2012) is two full releases of Windows Server and 20 Linux kernel updates (given the 2.5 month cycle we’ve seen for the last few years). This is an eternity in technology. What’s important to me is that it’s a multi-product commitment to building and improving interoperability between the flagship products of two major technology companies. This means we can build the practices to sustain great interoperable software over the long term as our industry and customer needs continue to evolve.

This talk covers two major components of the future of Linux and Windows interoperability: Virtualization and Web Services protocols.

On the Metal focuses on the virtualization interoperability work being done between Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server virtualization, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Xen.

On the Wire covers the details and challenges of implementing standards specifications, such as WS-Federation and WS-Management; and how protocol interoperability will enable effective and secure virtualization deployment and management.

These are the key components required for the next-generation datacenter. We know the datacenters of today are mixtures of Windows, Linux, and Unix, x86, x64 and RISC architectures, and a range of storage and networking gear. Virtualization is required to enable server consolidation and dynamic IT; it must be cross-platform. Once applications from multiple platforms are running on a single server, they need to be managed – ideally from a single console. Finally, they must still meet the demands of security and auditability, so regardless of OS they must be accessible by the right users at the right levels of privilege. Hence, cross-platform virtualization demands cross-platform management and identity.

In non-virtualized environments, a single operating system is in direct control of the hardware. In a virtualized environment a Virtual Machine Monitor manages one or more guest operating systems that are in “virtual” control of the hardware, each independent of the other.

A hypervisor is a special implementation of a Virtual Machine Monitor. It is software that provides a level of abstraction between a system’s hardware and one or more operating systems running on the platform.

Virtualization optimizations enable better performance by taking advantage of “knowing” when an OS is a host running on HW or a guest running on a virtual machine.

Paravirtualization , as it applies to Xen and Linux, is an open API between a hypervisor and Linux and a set of optimizations that together, in keeping with the open source philosophy, encourage development of open-source hypervisors and device drivers.

Enlightenment is an API and a set of optimizations designed specifically to enhance the performance of Windows Server in a Windows virtualized environment.

Hardware manfuacturers are interested in virtualization as well. Intel and AMD have independently developed virtualization extensions to the x86 architecture. They are not directly compatible with each other, but serve largely the same functions. Either will allow a hypervisor to run an unmodified guest operating system without incurring significant performance penalties.

Intel's virtualization extension for 32-bit and 64-bit x86 architecture is named IVT (short for Intel Virtualization Technology). The 32-bit or IA-32 IVT extensions are referred to as VT-x. Intel has also published specifications for IVT for the IA-64 (Itanium) processors which are referred to as VT-i; .

AMD's virtualization extensions to the 64-bit x86 architecture is named AMD Virtualization, abbreviated AMD-V.

There are three Virtual Machine Monitor models.

A type 2 Virtual Machine Monitor runs within a host operating system. It operates at a level above the host OS and all guest environments operate at a level above that. Examples of these guest environments include the Java Virtual Machine and Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime, which runs as part of the .NET environment and is a “managed execution environment” that allows object-oriented classes to be shared among applications.

The hybrid model, shown in the middle of the diagram has been used to implement Virtual PC, Virtual Server and VMWare GSX. These rely on a host operating system that shares control of the hardware with the virtual machine monitor.

A type 1 Virtual Machine Monitor employs a hypervisor to control the hardware with all operating systems run at a level above it. Windows Server virtualization (WSv) and Xen are examples of type 1 hypervisor implementations.

Development of Xen and the Linux hypervisor API paravirt_ops began prior to release of Intel and AMD’s virtualized hardware and were designed, in part, to solve the problems inherent in running a virtualized environment on non-virtualization-assisted hardware. They continue to support both virtualization-assisted and non-virtualization-assisted hardware. These approaches are distinct from KVM, or the Kernel-based Virtual Machine, supports only virtualization-assisted hardware; this approach uses the Linux kernel as the hypervisor and QEMU to set up virtual environments for Linux guest OS partitions.

In keeping with the open source community’s philosophy of encouraging development of open source code, the paravirt_ops API is designed to support open-source hypervisors. Earlier this year VMware’s VMI was added to the kernel as was Xen. Paravirt_ops is in effect a function table that enables different hypervisors – Xen, VMware, WSv – to provide implementation of a standard hypercall interface, including a default set of functions that write to the hardware normally.

Windows Server 2008 enlightenments have been designed to allow WS 2008 to run in either a virtualized or non-virtualized environment *unmodified*. WS 2008 recognizes when it is running as a guest on top of WSv and dynamically applies the enlightenment optimizations in such instances.

In addition to a hypercall interface and a synthethic device model, memory management and the WS 2008 scheduler are designed with optimizations for when the OS runs as a virtual machine.

The WSv architecture is designed so that a parent partition provides services to the child partitions that run as guests in the virtual environment. From left to right:

Native WSv Components:

VMBus – Virtual Machine Bus – Serves as a synthetic bus for the system, enabling child partitions to access native drivers.
VSP – Virtual Service Provider – Serves as an interface between the VMBus and a physical device
HCL Drivers – “Hardware Compatibility List” Drivers (standard native Windows drivers that have passed WHQL certification)
VSC – Virtual Service Consumer – Functions as a synthetic device. For example, a filesystem will talk to the VSC controller instead of an IDE controller. This in turn communicates with the VSP to dispatch requests through the native driver.

Interoperability Components:

Linux VSC – Interoperability component that serves as a synthetic Linux driver. Functions like the VSC in a Windows partition. Developed by XenSource and published under a BSD-style license.
Hypercall Adapter – Adapts Linux paravirt_ops hypercalls to WSv

Like the WSv architecture, the Xen architecture is designed so that a special partition, in this case Dom 0, provides services to guest partitions that run in a virtual environment.

Native Xen Components:

paravirt_ops is a Linux-kernel-internal function table that is designed to support hypervisor-specific function calls. The default function pointers from paravirt_ops support running as a host on bare metal. Xen provides its own set of functions that implement paravirtualization.
Native Drivers – standard set of drivers in the Linux kernel
Xen/Linux ABI – having a consistent ABI enables long-term compatibility between guest operating systems and the Xen hypervisor

Interoperability Components:

Xen Virtualized Drivers – Windows synthetic device drivers must be converted to Xen-virtualized drivers. These are developed using the Windows DDK and will be distributed as binary only per the DDK license.
Xen/Windows ABI – The binary interface that integrates Windows with Xen, enabling Windows hypercalls to be executed through Xen instead of WSv. This will be licensed under the GPL and made available when the WSv top-level functional specification is made public.

The slide says it all… I couldn’t figure out a way to put this one in a graphic. ;)

Virtualization interoperability testing is very challenging. While the architecture may look similar at a high level, the devil is in the details – down at the API and ABI level, the technologies are quite different.

From a personnel standpoint, the expertise required to debug OS kernels is hard to find, let alone software engineers with these skills who are focused on writing test code. Microsoft has established a role known as “Software Design Engineer in Test” or “SDE/T” which describes the combination of skills and attitude required to test large-scale complex software rigorously through automated white-box test development.

The problem of testing Linux and Windows OSes across WSv and Xen requires these kernel-level skills, but on both operating systems. It’s a non-trivial challenge.

Next is the technical issue of the test matrix:

Two full operating systems to test (Windows Server 2008 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10)
Single-core, dual-core, and quad-core CPUs
Single-processor, dual-processor, and quad-processor boards
Intel-VT and AMD-V chips
Basic device configuration (NIC, HD, etc.)

To put this in context, we need a minimum of 40 server chassis to test this matrix – for each operating system.

On top of this, the software components that must be tested include:

Linux VSC
Windows PV hardware drivers
Xen/Windows ABI
Linux/WSv hypercall adapter

Since Windows and Linux are general-purpose operating systems, these components must be tested across a range of workloads which will guarantee consistent, high-performance operation regardless of usage (file serving, web serving, compute-intensive operations, networking, etc.).

Finally – and no less a challenge than the skills and technology aspects – is that of building a shared culture between two very different and mature engineering culture. What is the definition of a “Severity 1” or “Priority 1” designation for a defect? How do these defects compete for the core product engineering teams’ attention? How are defects tracked, escalated, processed, and closed across two different test organizations’ software tools? Most importantly, what is the quality of the professional relationships between engineers and engineering management of the two organizations? These are the critical issues to make the work happen at high quality and with consistency over the long term.

WS-Management is an industry standard protocol managed by the DMTF (Distributed Management Taskforce), whose working group members include HP, IBM, Sun, BEA, CA, Intel, and Microsoft among others. The purpose is to bring a unified cross-platform management backplane to the industry, enabling customers to implement heterogeneous datacenters without having separate management systems for each platform.

All Microsoft server products ship with extensive instrumentation, known as WMI. A great way to see the breadth of this management surface is to download Hyperic (an open source management tool) and attach it to a Windows server – all of the different events and instrumentation will show up in the interface, typically several screen pages long.

It is not surprising that the management tools vendors are collaborating on this work – and it’s essential to have not just hardware, OS, and management providers but application layer vendors like BEA as well – but to me the most important aspect of the work is the open source interoperability.

In the Microsoft-Novell Joint Interoperability Lab, we are testing the Microsoft implementation of WS-Management (WinRM) against the openwsman and wiseman open source stacks. This matters because the availability of proven, interoperable open source implementations will make it relatively easy for all types of providers of both management software and managed endpoints to adopt a technology that works together with existing systems out of the box. Regardless of development or licensing model, commercial and community software will be able to connect and be well-managed in customer environments.

So what does this all mean? We’ll see end-to-end interoperability, where any compliant console can manage any conforming infrastructure – and since the specification and the code are open, the barriers to entry are very low. It’s important that this capability extends to virtualized environments (which is non-trivial) so that customers can get the full potential of the benefits of virtualization – not just reducing servers at the cost of increased management effort.

Sometimes people challenge me with the statement “if you would just build software to the specification, you wouldn’t need to all this interoperability engineering!” This is in fact a mistaken understanding of interoperability engineering. Once you’ve read through a specification – tens to hundreds of pages of technical detail – and written an implementation that matches the specification, then the real work begins. Real-world interoperability is not about matching what’s on paper, but what’s on the wire. This is why it’s essential to have dedicated engineering, comprehensive automated testing, and multiple products and projects working together. A good example of this is the engineering process for Microsoft’s Web Services stack. The specifications (all 36 of them) are open, and licensed under the OSP (Open Specification Promise). In the engineering process, Microsoft tests the Windows Web Services implementation against the IBM and the Apache Axis implementations according to the WS-I Basic profile. A successful pass against all these tests is “ship criteria” for Microsoft, meaning we won’t ship our implementation unless it passes.

In the messy world of systems management, where multiple generations of technologies at a wide range of ontological levels (devices, motherboards, networking gear, operating systems, databases, middleware, applications, event aggregators, and so on) testing is complex. Adding virtualization into this mix adds another layer of complexity, necessitating methodical and disciplined testing.

Open ID is a distributed single sign-on system, primarily for websites. It’s supported by a range of technology providers including AOL, LiveJournal, and Microsoft.

WS-Federation is the identity federation web services standard which allows different identity providers to work together to exchange or negotiate information about user identity. It is layered on top of other Web Services specifications including WS-Trust, WS-Security, and WS-SecurityPolicy – many of which are lacking an open source implementation today.

ADFS is Active Directory Federation Services, a mechanism for identity federation built into Microsoft Active Directory.

Cardspace is an identity metasystem, used to secure user information and unify identity management across any internet site.

Project Higgins is an Eclipse project intended to develop open source implementations of the WS-Federation protocol stack as well as other identity technologies including OpenID and SAML.

Samba is a Linux/Unix implementation of Microsoft’s SMB/CIFS protocols for file sharing and access control information. It is widely deployed in Linux-based appliances and devices, and ships in every popular distribution of Linux as well as with Apple’s OS X.

This work is still in early phases, and you can expect more details here in the future. Mike Milinkovich of Eclipse has been a champion for improving the interoperability of Eclipse and Microsoft technologies, especially Higgins. Separately the Bandit Project has made significant progress in building technologies which support CardSpace. I appreciate the work of these teams and look forward to more progress here.

The slide says it all here. We’re committed to long term development and delivery of customer-grade interoperability solutions for Windows and Linux, and we’ll do it in a transparent manner. Tom Hanrahan, the Director of the Microsoft-Novell Joint Interoperability Lab, brings many years of experience in running projects where the open source community is a primary participant. I and my colleagues at Microsoft are excited to learn from him as he puts his experiences at the OSDL/Linux Foundation and at IBM’s Linux Technology Center into practice guiding the work of the lab.

You can expect regular updates from us on the progress and plans for our technical work, and I expect you to hold me and Tom accountable for this promise.

I hope you found the presentation valuable. I felt it was important to get this material out broadly since it will impact many people and essential to be clear about what we are building together with Novell, XenSource, and the open source community.

Samba, IPv6 and Windows/Linux Interoperability: Sam interviews Dr. David Holder

Sam Ramji — Thu, 31 May 2007 22:36:00 GMT

I got the chance to meet many extremely smart developers last month at SambaXP, the annual Samba developer conference. After attending I’m convinced that the Samba team knows more about how Windows networking works than most Microsoft developers.

One of the most informative sessions I attended was led by Dr. David Holder, an expert on IP networking and Windows/Linux interoperability. Specifically, he focuses on the IPv6 protocol, implementation, and interop, where he sees great opportunities for improved service levels in a range of applications and environments, but also sees a coming wave of interoperability problems between IPv6 implementations on various platforms.

He’s done some very slick stuff in getting Samba to work with Windows Vista and Longhorn’s IPv6 stack, which is encouraging, and lays out a roadmap for future interop work between the platforms.

We are posting the link to his slides along with this podcast of his interview, and David will be available to answer questions posted to the comments section of this page.

Cheers,

Sam

Links:

Dr. Holder's SambaXP “Vista and Samba with IPv6” presentation:

http://www.ipv6consultancy.com/ipv6blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/samba-and-vista-with-ipv6v2.pdf.

Details regarding how to IPv6 enable Samba4:

http://www.ipv6consultancy.com/ipv6blog/?p=12

Microsoft-Novell Interoperability Lab – Sneak Peek

Sam Ramji — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 14:06:00 GMT

Based on the email I received I would say that many Port 25 readers noticed my post last week on job openings in my new lab. Thank you for your positive responses (and especially the resume submissions)! Brad Cutler, my counterpart at Novell, has been overwhelmed with responses as well, so thank you on his behalf.

I’ve called this a sneak peek because there is much work ahead of us, but it’s time to talk in a little more detail about what the lab will be doing. I and my colleagues at Novell and within Microsoft have been putting in long hours for the last several weeks – nights and weekends as well – detailing the plans for our work together. As you may have seen covered in the news this week (“Microsoft and Novell Announce Collaboration for Customers”), we’ve got a solid long-term plan that covers our cooperation in the following areas:

Virtualization: We will rigorously test the functionality and reliability of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on the next generation of Windows Server virtualization as well as Longhorn Server on Xen. This focuses on paravirtualization and enlightenments. Here’s a great discussion of Xen paravirtualization and a set of presentations on Windows Server enlightenments. Part of the challenge in delivering enterprise-grade heterogeneous virtualization is in ensuring correct behavior and performance across a broad range of hardware – AMD and Intel, single/dual/quad socket, and single through multi-core CPUs.
Directory and Identity: Directory interoperability is the basis of identity interoperability - directories contain the structure and content that provides the raw material for identity. Through our ongoing testing in the lab, Microsoft and Novell will improve directory and identity interop between Active Directory and eDirectory, using open specifications such as WS-Federation and WS-Security.
Management: We’ll test WS-Management for interop between Microsoft System Center and Novell’s WS-Management implementation, which Novell is developing in the open source community under the openwsman project.

Why are these the most important areas for us to work on?

As part of the Interoperability Customer Executive Council, I heard from the heads of IT from Goldman Sachs, UNICEF, American Express, NATO, and 25 more global organizations that server consolidation is essential in allowing them to reduce costs. In order to fully achieve server consolidation, they need to be able to move their existing workloads – both Windows and Linux – to a common set of server hardware. Without interoperable hypervisors, IT shops would be forced to support two separate sets of hardware, software, and personnel in order to consolidate their servers: one set for Windows and another for Linux. We don’t think that’s good enough.

Hypervisor interoperability is critical, but for this scenario it isn’t enough to deliver the full benefits of virtualization for an enterprise. Once the workloads are running on the same server and the same hypervisor, access control and authorization needs to work across the entire environment consistently – otherwise you’re just shifting the interop problem up the stack, only to suffer later. This is where WS-Federation is essential – implementing an open specification to federate identity between existing directory servers enables you to have consistent security policies across your heterogeneous workloads. This is a continuation of work we’ve done with IBM, Apache, Ping Identity and SXIP Identity.

Operations relies on strong management tools to provide availability and reliability across a broad server environment. Ops teams typically have training on specific toolsets to monitor, administrate, and manage their infrastructure. Realistically, moving Windows and Linux workloads onto the same set of servers requires that existing management tools be extended to the new environment. We believe (as do HP, IBM, BMC, CA, and many others) that WS-Management is the solution. Implementing this open specification will enable servers, applications, and services to communicate with management consoles from multiple vendors.

I’ve had a few people approach me about this project who pontificated “If you [Microsoft] would just implement the specifications as they’re written, you wouldn’t have to do all this work!” In fact, this is an incorrect understanding of software engineering and interoperability. Making protocols truly interoperate in every realistic circumstance is one of the great challenges in engineering. In real life, you have to implement the specification correctly – and then the work begins. Were there platform-specific assumptions in the code (as basic as big-endian vs. little-endian format)? Were there parts of the spec that were subject to interpretation? Due to the extensive development and testing embedded in technologies like TCP/IP and HTTP, it’s easy to forget that it took years of work by many parties to deliver what we now take for granted.

This work across virtualization, identity, and management is a pretty awesome undertaking, and I expect that as we continue to progress here we’ll discover new things we need to do in order to deliver interoperable computing. I’m looking forward to reporting on it here, and have submitted a presentation abstract for OSCON ’07 to walk through the Joint Interoperability Lab’s operations in detail. Hopefully I can shed a little light on what makes interoperability so challenging, even in an age of open specifications.

Cheers,

Sam