Yesterday Microsoft announced the general availability of Windows Server 2016 which the company defines as a cloud-ready OS.
Beside fancy definitions, one of the most relevant perks of this release is that enables windows users to consume container virtualization technologies through two different technologies: Windows Server Containers & Hyper-V Containers.
The first allowed Docker Engine to be ported on windows, where has been in technical preview for over a year.
As a consequence Docker and Microsoft announced a commercial partnership during the Ignite, but, despite this relationship, Docker Engine is not an integral part of Windows Server setup, nor Windows Update. Though a PowerShell script is at your disposal to make the magic happen.
Hyper-V Containers comes from Microsoft’s strategy to support containers within its pre-existing hypervisor ecosystem, a similar (but not identical from a technology standpoint) approach to VMware’s vSphere Integrated Containers. Using Microsoft’s own definition:
multiple container instances can run concurrently on a host; however, each container runs inside of a special virtual machine. This provides kernel level isolation between each Hyper-V container and the container host
You can give a peek downloading Windows Server 2016 Evaluation from this link.