The Register is reporting that Microsoft is working on supporting the Ubuntu and Debian Linux distributions as supported guest Operating Systems within Hyper-V. The information comes from an interview held with Sandy Gupta, General Manager for marketing strategy for the Open Solutions Group within Microsoft. Last month Microsoft already announced support for CentOS on top of the already supported Linux distributions SuSE and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
Although several community efforts are being made to support other Linux distributions within Hyper-V, the fact that this eventually isn’t supported by Microsoft is what keeping companies to actually implement the solution. By supporting more and more Linux distributions, Microsoft is clearly challenging other companies by providing a solution for hosting Linux VM’s both on-premise on its Hyper-V virtualization solution, as off-premise on its Azure cloud platform.