Hyper-V Supports Free Linux for Hosters

Building on existing support for Red Hat or SUSE Linuxon Windows Hyper-V, Microsoft announced in May 2011 that it will support CentOS. CentOS is a Linux distribution that is often used by ISPs, hosters, and Web-based businesses. Hyper-V support for CentOS should parallel the Hyper-V support of other Linux distributions where the distributor provides support for the platform. However, support for CentOS will be different because there is no commercial distributor such as Red Hat or Attachmate responsible for CentOS, a completely community-supported Linux distribution.

Hyper-V Support for Linux

Hyper-V enables multiple computer configurations called virtual machines (VMs) to share a single physical computer running Windows Server. The computer and its hardware are controlled by Windows running in a VM called the primary partition, while other VMs called child partitions run other OSs (including third-party OSs) and applications. The technology helps organizations maximize server utilization and simplifies management tasks such as moving workloads between servers and cloning server configurations to bring up new servers.