Calling the Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone "community Linux", Microsoft have announced that Windows Server Hyper-V will now support CentOS. The announcement was made during the keynote given by Sandy Gupta at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) being held in San Francisco. Gupta, General Manager of Marketing with Microsoft's Open Solutions Group, said that, as CentOS is a popular Linux Distribution for web hosting companies, this was "the number one requirement for interoperability". Hyper-V is Microsoft's virtualisation solution and web hosting companies are heavy users of virtualisation.

Specifically, Windows Server2008 R2 Hyper-V will support CentOS, but Gupta did not detail any technical or community work done to enable the support. He also did not disclose which particular versions of CentOS were to be supported. CentOS's position as a first class guest on Hyper-V appears to be currently limited to support from Microsoft. "If a customer calls, we will prove installation and configuration support for CentOS as well, and not tell them to go find a vendor for CentOS", Gupta is reported as saying.

Hyper-V already supports SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (with service pack 3) and 11 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.2, 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5. As CentOS is a clone of RHEL, there should be little if any technical complexity in supporting CentOS, although comments on the announcement in the "Openness@Microsoft" blog suggest that currently the process is far from simple.

(djwm)