Build a virtual infrastructure that integrates well with your existing technology investments. VMware vSphere is the most broadly deployed and trusted virtualization platform in the world. With more than 50,000 technology and consulting partners, VMware has created a strong support ecosystem that gives customers peace of mind knowing that VMware solutions integrate well with their existing hardware and software investments.
See how VMware can help you:
- Get the broadest hardware support
- Access the largest number of guest operating systems
- Gain access to broad application support
- Leverage our partner support programs
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VMware Supports the Largest Number of Guest Operating Systems
VMware vSphere supports more guest operating systems than any other bare-metal virtualization platform. VMware vSphere delivers superior performance with unmodified (fully virtualized) guests, made possible by VMware's exclusive binary translation technology. That means that vSphere can run off-the-shelf operating systems with near-native performance. Other hypervisors suffer serious performance degradation with unmodified guests. VMware vSphere also supports transparent paravirtualization for guest operating systems, which allows a single binary version of the operating system to run either on native hardware or on a hypervisor in paravirtualized mode. This means that support for paravirtualization interfaces is compiled into the kernel, and is present even when the kernel is running on native hardware. Working with members of the Linux community, including IBM, Red Hat, and XenSource, VMware co-defined paravirt_ops, an open-interface standard for paravirtualizing Linux guests.
VMware vSphere supports all guest operating systems in a consistent, unbiased manner. For example, VMware vSphere supports 32-way virtual SMP for any supported guest OS (unless the guest's SMP support on a physical machine is for fewer CPUs, such as XP and Vista, which are 2-way only).
See the VMware Guest Operating System Installation Guide for full details on guest support.
| Guest Operating System Support |
VMware vSphere 5
|
Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2
|
Citrix Xen Server 6
|
|---|---|---|---|
| TOTAL |
85
|
25
|
30
|
| Windows NT 4.0 |
|
|
|
| Windows 2000 |
|
|
|
| Windows Server 2003 64-bit |
|
|
|
| Windows Server 2003 |
|
|
|
| Windows Server 2008 64-bit |
|
|
|
| Windows Server 2008 |
|
|
|
| Windows 7 64-bit |
|
|
|
| Windows 7 |
|
|
|
| Windows XP 64-bit |
|
|
|
|
Windows XP
|
|
|
|
| Windows Vista 64-bit |
|
|
|
|
Windows Vista
|
|
|
|
| Windows 98 |
|
|
|
| Windows 95 |
|
|
|
| Windows 3.1 |
|
|
|
| MS-DOS 6.22 |
|
|
|
| Windows Preinstallation Environment 2 64-bit |
|
|
|
| Windows Preinstallation Environment 2 |
|
|
|
| Windows Home Server 2011 |
|
|
|
| Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 |
|
|
|
| Windows Small Business Server 2011 |
|
|
|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 64-bit |
|
|
|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 |
|
|
|
|
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 64-bit
|
|
|
|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 |
|
|
|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 64-bit |
|
|
|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 |
|
|
|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 64-bit |
|
|
|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 |
|
|
|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 |
|
|
|
| SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 64-bit |
|
|
|
| SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 |
|
|
|
|
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 64-bit
|
|
|
|
| SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 |
|
|
|
| SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 64-bit |
|
|
|
| SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 |
|
|
|
| SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 |
|
|
|
| Ubuntu 11 Linux 64-bit |
|
|
|
| Ubuntu 11 Linux |
|
|
|
| Ubuntu 10 Linux 64-bit |
|
|
|
| Ubuntu 10 Linux |
|
|
|
| Ubuntu 9 Linux 64-bit |
|
|
|
| Ubuntu 9 Linux |
|
|
|
| Ubuntu 8 Linux 64-bit |
|
|
|
| Ubuntu 8 Linux |
|
|
|
| Ubuntu 7 Linux 64-bit |
|
|
|
| Ubuntu 7 Linux |
|
|
|
| Novell NetWare 6 |
|
|
|
| Novell NetWare 5 |
|
|
|
| OS/2 Warp 4 |
|
|
|
| Oracle (Sun) Solaris 10 x86 64-bit |
|
|
|
| Oracle Solaris 10 x86 |
|
|
|
| Oracle Solaris 9 x86 |
|
|
|
| Oracle Solaris 8 x86 |
|
|
|
| SCO OpenServer 5 |
|
|
|
| SCO UnixWare 7 |
|
|
|
| CentOS 6 64-bit |
|
|
|
| CentOS 6 |
|
|
|
| CentOS 5 64-bit |
|
|
|
| CentOS 5 |
|
|
|
| CentOS 4 64-bit |
|
|
|
| CentOS 4 |
|
|
|
| Oracle Linux 6 64-bit |
|
|
|
| Oracle Linux 6 |
|
|
|
| Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 64-bit |
|
|
|
|
Oracle Enterprise Linux 5
|
|
|
|
|
Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 64-bit
|
|
|
|
|
Oracle Enterprise Linux 4
|
|
|
|
|
Debian 6 64-bit
|
|
|
|
|
Debian 6
|
|
|
|
|
Debian 5 64-bit
|
|
|
|
|
Debian 5
|
|
|
|
|
Debian 4 64-bit
|
|
|
|
|
Debian 4
|
|
|
|
|
FreeBSD 8 64-bit
|
|
|
|
|
FreeBSD 8
|
|
|
|
|
FreeBSD 7 64-bit
|
|
|
|
|
FreeBSD 7
|
|
|
|
|
FreeBSD 6 64-bit
|
|
|
|
|
FreeBSD 6
|
|
|
|
|
Asianux 4 64-bit
|
|
|
|
|
Asianux 4
|
|
|
|
|
Asianux 3 64-bit
|
|
|
|
|
Asianux 3
|
|
|
|
|
Serenity Systems eComStation 2
|
|
|
|
|
Serenity Systems eComStation 1.2R
|
|
|
|
|
Apple Mac OS X 10 64-bit
|
|
|
|
|
Apple Mac OS X 10
|
|
|
|
| TOTAL |
85
|
25
|
30
|
Data taken June 22, 2012
* Windows Server 2012 is not yet generally available. Guest OS support provided for current version of Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1
