Trying to clarify. We are talking about 3 things: 1) OS virtualization for Windows. We announced this last year: http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/10/15/new-windows-serve... 2) Nano Server -- A small Windows Server sku. Perfect for containers, but also useful for other scenarios where you need a small, cloud optimized Windows 3) Hyper-V Containers -- Think if you wanted to optimize a hypervisor with assumption that it is only running a container. What enlightenments would you enable? What management interface would you put on it? We'll have more details later, but this is the core concept.

I guess the question is, are these containers a shared kernel, near zero overhead kinda thing? So I could just run, say, DNS or a file share in a container without paying any overhead. Like what containers/jails or OpenVZ can do on Linux.

In other words, if you want to run a Linux based Docker container on Windows you're still going to need Virtual Box.

> In other words, if you want to run a Linux based Docker container on Windows you're still going to need Virtual Box.

Is this a surprise?

Containerisation is not magical pixie dust -- it's a particular approach to implementation that is specific to the OS. You have a single kernel, and it follows that in general that single kernel will only allow corresponding containers to be run.

That there will be a Docker server backend that can speak Hyper-V doesn't magically make a Windows kernel into a Linux kernel, or vice versa.

You have a good understanding of why this is the case. Hyper-V would be doing the job of Virtual Box and boot2docker which is what most developers have been using to run Docker daemon on non-linux hosts. I've tried the Hyper-V driver with Docker Machine and had some issues. So I'll be sticking with Virtual Box until that changes.

Or Hyper-V, or VMWare Equivalent (Fusion/Workstation/etc)

They're doing OS-level virtualization in Linux Azure instances, sure. They don't seem committed to OS-level virtualization in Windows, unless I've missed something.

edit: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/drawbridge/ ?

That's what you would assume when you look at the image. But

> Hyper-V Containers, a new container deployment option with enhanced isolation powered by Hyper-V virtualization.

Everything written tells a different story. "Hyper-V virtualization" means virtual machines, making it not a container. They just try to make that sound like a feature.

Or do you have more information than I do?

All we have is a press release. The diagram and the constant references to containers would seem to indicate these are, well, containers. You're picking at a few things and assuming they mean that the rest of the release is wrong. Why?