Microsoft To Support CentOS Linux In Hyper-V 291
jbrodkin writes "Long the enemy of Linux users, Microsoft is apparently seeing dollar signs in the Linux-dominated Web server market. Microsoft's virtualization software, Hyper-V, will immediately add support for CentOS Linux, a community version of Red Hat that even Microsoft notes is a 'popular Linux distribution for hosters.' 'This enables our Hosting partners to consolidate their mixed Windows + Linux infrastructure on Windows Server Hyper-V,' Microsoft said. In addition to Web hosting, this targets another area where Microsoft is stuck in second place: the virtualization market dominated by VMware."
Re:does anybody really use hyper-V? (Score:3, Interesting)
The facts are Hyper-V is behind in features and performance than others. For example, only since 2008 R2 SP1 a few months ago do they support shared memory. Before that, if you had 10 hosts and wanted to grant each 4 GB of RAM, you needed 40 GB in your host. If you didn't have enough RAM, you couldn't boot up your guests - lack of memory. That's a serious drawback, especially since the host OS can consume memory at will. There have been times that I've shutdown a Hyper-V guest and I couldn't boot it back up because the host had done something to use a few more MB's of RAM than before.
Re:As seen in another Slashdot sig... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really,
Linux key strength over windows isn't stability or security. It is the fact that it is hugely customizable and great for making pre-packaged virtual machines that do one or two things and does them well. For the most part the office could be nearly all Microsoft and its administration staff are windows administrators and they treat that random Linux VM as just as an other application. Vs. the inverse of having to deal with a Linux system and each windows VM as its own OS that needs administration. Because Windows isn't customizable to an appliance as well as Linux can be.
Wow Support a Distro that may be dead (Score:4, Interesting)
User are leaving Centos left and right, security patches are months behind schedule, Centos 6 is over 6 months behind RH enterprise 6, the devs are a closed group and will not accept help, and do there best to allienate the user base.
What about para-virtualization? (Score:4, Interesting)
OpenVZ (Virtuozzo) and Linux-VServer used to be the big names in virtualization. Now Linux has LXC in the mainline kernel. Virtualization with Xen and KVM are nice. But when you want to run Linux in virtualized guests you get a much better performance with para virtualization.
Xen and KVM are useful is you want to run Windows as a guest. But for Linux guests I really recommend the above.
But why would you buy a commercial Hyper-V? VMware is there. VirtualBox has excellent support for Windows hosts and is free. I don't see how Microsoft could make any headway with all the excellent products with every ninche (commercial, open source, free, expensive) already taken.