Marking the two-year anniversary of their partnership, Microsoft and Novell said Wednesday they were releasing tools to help users manage and support SUSE Linux.

The news, which comes a week and a half after the official Nov. 2 anniversary date, was preceded by a new Microsoft investment in the partnership that took affect Nov. 1 and calls for the vendor to purchase up to $100 million in additional Novell SUSE Linux support coupons to distribute to users.

Microsoft announced in August its intention to make the investment, which lines up with a portion of Wednesday's announcement that calls for the coupons to cover Novell's new SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Subscription with Expanded Support.

Novell unveiled the expanded support option last week as a way to entice users to migrate from Red Hat and the CentOS to SUSE Linux. In addition to support for SUSE, the certificates provide Red Hat and CentOS server users with binaries built from source code publicly released by Red Hat for its platform.

All the pieces of the partnership are part of a cross-patent licensing deal the two signed in 2006 that outlined a five-year business and technology deal that also included intellectual property rights protection, an arrangement that drew the ire of open source advocates.

On Wednesday, the duo also said it would release a management module called the Advanced Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, which is slated to ship before the end of November. The pair also announced a free beta download of Novell's Moonlight, a clone of Microsoft's rich-client Silverlight browser plug-in.

The news comes on the heels of a September release of the first fully supported joint product the two have produced under the partnership. The duo used technology developed at the Microsoft/Novell Interoperability Lab they opened just more than a year ago in Cambridge, Mass., to configured and optimized Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to run as a guest operating system on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

Experts say the deal is benefiting both vendors and has helped IT integrate Windows and Linux platforms, including the Red Hat operating system.

"Overall, Novell has benefited on its bottom-line business revenue and that is pertinent," says Jay Lyman, an analyst with the 451 Group. "For Microsoft, it has given them a way to be a part of Linux adoption. It was pretty significant two years ago when Microsoft entered this deal. It showed they realized that Linux is in the market to stay and it would have been foolish for Microsoft not to have a Linux integration story. This deal has given them that."