Linux heads to Windows Azure in spring

Microsoft is preparing to let customers run the Linux operating system within a virtual machine on Windows Azure, sources have told ZDNet UK's sister site ZDNet.com.

The change, made possible by a technology that supports persistent virtual machines (VM), will be introduced to Windows Azure in the spring of 2012, according to Mary-Jo Foley, who spoke to Microsoft partners.

"The current VM role when rebooted or randomly recycled by the Azure platform loses any data stored — any persistence. So for applications that rely on the machine name or files/config that constitute 'state' not stored in SQL Azure (or externally), this is a problem," an anonymous Microsoft partner said. "This is also one of the technical reasons why you wouldn't try running SharePoint on the current Azure VM role."

Microsoft will not offer direct support of the Linux operating system, instead it will allow people to upload a Linux image into a persistent VM. The technology will also let people run SharePoint Server and SQL Server from VMs as well. Being able to run Linux on Windows Azure has been a frequently requested feature for some time, the sources said.

Cloud rival Amazon Web Services already lets people host Linux within virtual machines on its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure-as-a-service technology. VMware's Cloud Foundry also supports Linux and on the applications side recently started offering Microsoft .NET support, while Red Hat's OpenShift uses machines built around Red Hat Enterprise Linux.