Microsoft is teaming up with the OpenNebula project to create infrastructure-as-a-service clouds combining open source software and Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization platform. While Microsoft has traditionally been no friend to open source projects, Redmond’s attempt to gain broader acceptance of Hyper-V has led it to submit drivers to the Linux kernel and to support several Linux-based operating systems.

But supporting Linux isn’t really enough. Virtualization is increasingly being used by businesses to deploy Amazon-like infrastructure clouds within their own data centers, using a mix of hypervisors and cloud automation software. OpenNebula, cloud software released under the Apache License, was already supported by VMware, Xen, and KVM, but not by Hyper-V. That will change in mid-October when a prototype of the Hyper-V and OpenNebula integration components will be released under the Apache license, says OpenNebula project director Ignacio Llorente.

“Microsoft is providing support and technical guidance to [the] OpenNebula open-source project to add and maintain Hyper-V on the list of officially supported hypervisors,” Llorente writes. “The integration will support both variants of Hyper-V, namely in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. Disk images will be managed using a shared storage server (e.g. SAN) and standard POSIX calls from the OpenNebula server. OpenNebula will additionally leverage the networking management functionality provided by Hyper-V. The integration will not require the installation of new services in the nodes, making [it] quite simple and rapid to build an OpenNebula cloud on existing Hyper-V deployments.”

Microsoft previously ensured Hyper-V interoperability with OpenStack, another open source cloud computing project developed by NASA and Rackspace. Hyper-V is taking on an increasingly important role in Microsoft’s Windows platform, and will be featured in next year’s Windows Server 8 as well as in the Windows 8 desktop OS.