Regrettably, there is currently no substitute product offered.*
You can feel that the employee that wrote this knows this is a sinking ship.
Not quite.
Microsoft gives away Hyper-V Server for free, no license key needed. It is not time limited or crippled in any way.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-...
It runs in Server Core mode and the learning curve is much steeper outside an AD domain or for non-Windows turbonerds; but once set up properly it is extremely powerful and I prefer it over VMware. Linux support for Hyper-V is built-in and outstanding.
microsoft virtualization is long stuck in the past and forgotten, iykwim
if you need something more or less sane luke esxi, proxmox or even xen are way to go.
All HyperV hosts can only run Windows and certain Linux distros, this is not a limitation of the free offering.
Passthrough is also not available for most types of hardware in all versions of HyperV. An imperfect workaround is to use passthrough with Remote Desktop. I’m not telling you it’s good I’m telling you it exists.
HyperV server has a basic cli interface and it is indeed harder to manage than Windows Server with a desktop experience. When using the Server Core versions which do not have the desktop experience or the LTSC versions, the ui is the same. Some commands are not available.
Yes there has not been a release of the dedicated HyperV offering since 2016. It does not mean Microsoft will not release another one.
Sure seems to be the way they are thinking / acting / talking in public though.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-server-inside...
https://www.reddit.com/r/HyperV/comments/pejok9/microsoft_is...
I'm not sure where y'all are picking this up from, FreeBSD is even officially supported. I've run Redox and Haiku in it as well.
For non-production use cases though I recommend grabbing the latest Windows Server via a trial instead. The downside is you get 180 days per period and it can be renewed for 3 periods before it expires. The upside is you can just install Server Datacenter and get the kitchen sink, including full desktop. You do one VM migration and re-install and then the when that trial fully expires it's time to upgrade to the newer version of Windows Server anyways.
In which case, of course, Proxmox is there since years. So why would you encrap yourself with hyper-v and postpone the show for only a couple of years when you could implement a robust solution ?
If you're building a hip new product with a bunch of Linux VMs you defined yourself greenfield then it probably seems a little ridiculous, especially since most of your stuff is likely containers or at least hybrid cloud conscious out of the gate. At that point you can grab a low cost subscription for your couple of servers and call it a day for a few grand a year.
Nutanix is probably the option most people looking at (or currently using) Hyper-V would be weighing right now.
There are several substitute products, Proxmox being a common one.