Discussion on:

Hyper-V now supports CentOS guest virtual machines

Am I the only one that thinks this is funny? Fair warning... we are a Linux shop. Using a stripped down and hardened version of CentOS as a starting point, we have made a product which, barring external issues, we guarantee to have a six-sigma uptime... less than 2 minutes of downtime per year and less than 9 minutes over the 5 year product life.

Sorry guys, its far more likely that the MS OS will require major work than CentOS as long as both are properly installed and maintained (one of the reasons we switched). You will want your most stable machine on the bare metal, an put the rest on VMs so a crash on one will not affect the others. Use CentOS and run Virtual Box. Throw your MS server OS on this. Map the physical drive to the VM. All done.

The questions boil down to these:
If you're a MS shop, why would you use a CentOS VM?
If you are a Linux shop, why would you use an expensive (and arguably dodgy) MS product as a root OS when better free solutions abound?

We have a handful of Hyper-V machines with a few Linux based VM's. I really wish MS would support Ubuntu Server, since that is what we primarily use.

@Alpha_Dog
We are primarily a MS shop, but there are a few open source utilities we use so it is helpful to have support for some Linux distros.

Yaknow, I can see that now, especially if you are using the VMs as a support sandbox. Thanks for the reality check.

As far as Ubuntu support, have you considered using VirtualBox under Windows and use whatever client machine you like? I actually have some Android VMs running on Ubuntu Server with the GUI running on a separate VM on the workstation to simulate the separate kernel and Java layers.

Why use Hyper-V for Linux VM's? Put simply, for compatability. We purchased Windows Datacenter for 3 VM Hosts. Why Datacenter you may ask? Because DataCenter is licensed per CPU socket, so we can run as many Windows installs as we can on each physical system without having to purchase additional Licenses. We also use Linux, CentOS mostly, and having support for CentOS in HyperV means that we don't have to purchase or run other Hypervisors to support hose installs. With a single hypervisor platform we can do all those cool high availability things, and we don't have to train everyone on multiple hypervisors.

I was originally a VMware guy, and I like XenServer, but it comes down to simplicity and cost considerations. If I want all the benefits of the setup I have, but on XenServer or VMware, I have to purchase a full on Hypervisor setup, like vCenter, and then I still have to buy copies of Windows for each of my MS vms. That is just too much damn money, when I can get a much bigger bang-for-my buck with a few copies of Windows Datacenter!