In 2006, Microsoft and Novell agreed to work on improving compatibility between their products, and pledged not to pursue patent claims against each other's customers. The move has been widely by open-source software advocates.

But the relationship has borne significant fruit, according to Novell. The vendor said SUSE 11 will work "seamlessly" with Windows regarding areas like systems management, virtualization, document formats and even multimedia.

A new feature called Mono Extension provides support for Mono, allowing companies to run .NET applications on Linux systems without having to recompile the programs. The extension will also enable IBM System z mainframe users to run .NET applications.

SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 runs on a wide range of hardware and has also been optimized for "near-native" performance on a range of hypervisors, including VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen.

While Novell has included many new capabilities, there aren't necessarily many surprises, said Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady. "This is what you can expect from enterprise-class platforms, be they Linux or Windows, at this point. If you're a general-purpose OS, you need to be able to multitask."