One of the most heralded features in Windows Server 2012 (previously known as Windows Server 8) is support in Hyper-V for virtual machine replicas. If you're familiar with VMWare it's similar to Site Recovery Manager, for Xen you're probably looking at Remus, and Kemari for KVM (bear in mind that none of these products are necessarily exactly the same, but close enough). Virtual Machine replication across sites is very attractive. You get a lot of flexibility with minimal effort.

Whilst it's possible to get Debian, and by proxy Ubuntu, running under Hyper-V it's nice to see that Microsoft are potentiallygoing to officially support them along side CentOS, Red Hat and SuSE. As someone who is running Debian and Ubuntu under Hyper-V I would heartily welcome this official support. Sadly I suspect that if Gupta really does represent Microsoft's view, then the odds of getting on the official list is probably going to be quite low; "Gupta says Microsoft is drawing the line at ‘touching’ the Linux code.

Following up to yesterday's post on LXC: Linux Containers, I had a quick play with 2 ULAsubnets (aka RFC4193 addresses - dont forget that site-local was depreciated) - one subnet was dedicated to the LXC containers, one for my normal LAN. Perhaps unsurprisingly IPv6 appears to work perfectly well in this setup. I also altered the setup and bridged a container directly to eth0 on the host node, and watched the container assign itself a stateless address based on my prefix, and again everything appeared to work perfectly well out onto the public v6 network (courtesy of Hurricane Electric's Tunnel Brokerservice).

I've been toying with migrating my server into a containerized system, and almost bought a new server in preparation to migrate everything across. I'd chosen and tested my solution, OpenVz. All was good with the world. Until I saw that OpenVz was effectively being dropped from Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) and most likely Debian 6.0 (Squeeze). The reason for the drop is simply because the OpenVz patches haven't been forward ported into the current kernel.