One of the things that most impressed me about Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 (besides being free) was Microsoft’s official support of various Linux distros as a Guest OS. I started testing Virtual Server after I found that the then current version of VMware ESX 2.5 could not run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 based distros (CentOS 4 in my case). Microsoft Virtual Server did and when the R2 release officially listed RHEL4 and SUSE Linux as supported Guest OSes, I was pretty happy. So, I when I read this headline on Network World, I was really puzzled.
Hyper-V Leaves Linux Out In The Cold
I headed over to this Microsoft web page to check things out for myself…
Supported Guest OS on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V
…and verified that the only supported Linux distro there is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 with Service Pack 1. Now, to be fair, the list also does NOT include Microsoft’s own Windows Server 2000, Windows NT, Windows 98, or MS-DOS either. Hyper-V should at least include support for RHEL5 based distros, Ubuntu based distros, FreeBSD/OpenBSD, and Open Solaris.