Transitive announced that its QuickTransit software will run within Hyper-V, the Windows Server 2008 hypervisor released this month by Microsoft. This innovative product combination will allow enterprise customers to run Solaris/SPARC applications on the latest Windows-based servers without porting or recompilation, resulting in cost-effective new solutions for scalability, high availability, disaster recovery and legacy application re-hosting.

"QuickTransit and Hyper-V are a great fit," said Ian Robinson, vice-president of marketing for Transitive. "The combination of a leading cross-platform virtualization solution and a robust, affordable hypervisor integrated into the most broadly-deployed server operating system is a 'win-win' for enterprise customers. Used in Hyper-V, QuickTransit allows thousands of additional non-Windows applications to run on the latest Windows Server 2008 systems without the costs, delays or disruption of porting."

To run native Solaris/SPARC software on Windows Server 2008 requires deployment of a guest operating system such as Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 in a Hyper-V virtual machine, with Transitive's QuickTransit 1.5 for Solaris/SPARC-to-Linux/x86-64. A broad range of Solaris/SPARC executable files can then be run within that virtual machine, and these applications can interoperate with native Windows applications running on the same server. All of the considerable benefits of server virtualization, such as consolidation and rapid provisioning, are thereby available for legacy Solaris/SPARC workloads migrated from older RISC-based hardware.

To address the most typical customer deployments, Transitive offers three configurations of its QuickTransit product line: QuickTransit Workstation is intended for use on desktop and laptop PCs; QuickTransit Server is used for large-scale datacenter consolidation projects; and QuickTransit Legacy is a specialized version for application re-hosting from very old legacy hardware running operating system versions that are no longer supported.