Although Hyper-V 2012 will not support the wide variety of operating systems that are supported by vSphere, it supports enough guest operating systems for many organizations. The table below outlines the operating systems that can be installed under Hyper-V 2012. Note that newer operating systems, including Windows Server 2012, Windows 8 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, do not require a separate installation of Hyper-V’s Integration Services since the necessary components are already built into those operating systems. For other operating systems, however, you will still need to install Integration Services. For supported versions of CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, download Linux Integration Services v3.2.
| Windows Server | 2003 | SP2 | Datacenter, Enterprise, Standard, Web |
| 2003 R2 | SP2 | Datacenter, Enterprise, Standard, Web | |
| 2008 | Datacenter, Enterprise, Standard, Web | ||
| 2008 R2 | Datacenter, Enterprise, Standard, Web | ||
| 2012 | Standard, Datacenter | ||
| Windows Home Server | 2011 | ||
| Windows SBS | 2011 | ||
| Windows Client | 8 | ||
| 7 | |||
| Vista | SP2 | ||
| XP | SP3 | ||
| XP x64 | SP2 | ||
| Linux | CentOS | 6.0 – 6.2 | |
| RHEL | 6.0 – 6.2 | ||
| SLES | 11 SP2 |