One of the fantastic legacies and possibilities of using the VMware environment is a huge number of operating systems which are supported, or at least working well on top of ESXi.

Usually all types of OS you can imagine works so well that you don’t think it can be different. By run well – I mean, the ability to start, discover disk, network card or even chance to create a snapshot or vMotion. 

That possibility makes VMware very attractive to run in Public Cloud, where you can migrate your current vSphere workload (usually) without any change. There is no need to convert a VM (for example from ESXi VM format to hyperV or KVM). This makes life much easier and speeds up the migration process. 

Just imagine, that you have a very old legacy system, like Windows 2000 or even WindowsNT. Old Debian, RedHat – not a problem if you consider using AVS or VMC.

No one wants to keep such in the DC, but it is not a rare situation that we have it in our inventories. It is hard to upgrade such servers  (if it would be possible to migrate them in the past, someone would do that), replatforming, rehosting — just in dreams. 

With VMware implementation in the cloud we can simply do the VM relocation and if nothing fancy run them as it was in the on-prem. Moreover, you can utilize NSX-t microsegmentation (segments, DFW) to separate such workload and HCX L2 extension to migrate such without IP readdressing. 

But let’s back to the possibility of hosting legacy OS on VMC/AVS.

If you need to easily find what out what is on the supported list, what support you can still expect from the brilliant VMware team please verify: 

https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php

Select the environment where you have VMware (VMC or ESXi with version you are using; most likely 7.0uX; please verify https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-vmware/concepts-private-clouds-clusters#vmware-software-versions for AVS)

Select OS you are using and follow the links below the table.

For example, for Windows 2000 this page provides a few KB articles worth knowing in order to achieve better compatibility with VMwaere. Support for Windows 2000 is defined as “Support is Deprecated” which the link to definition:https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2015161

The KB2015161 provides the following definitions:

• Tech preview
• Supported
• Legacy
• Deprecated
• Terminated
• Unsupported

For our Windows 2000 example, as the system is deprecated, which means it is still supported by VMware, it still receives technical support and engineering fixes but it is a step ahead of the terminated state. For such VMware recommends to migrate to a newer OS.

So, as you can see VMware still takes care about such old OS. Of course – as everyone else – it would recommend the migration. But you can trust that it will run in ESXi.