Cretec's "Virtual Enthusiasm" Blog - Clint Eschberger

In what is a big mistake, in my opinion, Microsoft has chosen to only support Suse Linux in Hyper-V. If they want to truly compete with VMware and other virtualization companies they are going to have to open this up. This does not mean you can not run other distros, however it will not be supported by Microsoft. In today's corporate world that is a death nail for most companies.

Mitchell Ashley makes the following point on his blog:

"No offense to SUSE Enterprise Server crowd, but only providing SUSE support in Hyper-V is a huge mistake. By not supporting Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, and BSD, Microsoft is telling us Hyper-V is a Microsoft only technology. More Mt. Redmond, Microsoft center of the universe thinking. That's disappointing.

Sure, if you are a Microsoft only shop, Hyper-V will be an option for virtualization. But so will VMware and XenServer. But if you run a mixed shop, Hyper-V won't solve your problems alone — you'll have to also add VMware or Xen to your virtualized data center portfolio. Or just go with VMware and Xen and forego Hyper-V."

Since Hyper-V is feature complete this may not be changed anytime in the near future, but they better start thinking about it now. I know this will be a major issue for shops that have a mixed environment.

Microsoft is already having to play catch up to not only VMware, but XenServer. If they do not watch it, this will turn out no better than their previous virtualization efforts, lost!