Linux containers can only run on Linux host operating systems and Windows containers can only run on Windows host operating systems. While that’s more of a problem for Windows, which is the newcomer to the container phenomenon, a key benefit of containers is portability. The easier it is to deploy a container regardless of the underlying infrastructure, the closer the ideal comes to being realized.
Microsoft is partially solving the issue for its user base with the funky Hyper-V containers that it released to some industry head-scratching with Windows Server 2016. (Why add the management and processing overhead of virtualization to containers?) The rest of the solution is coming from Docker and from Linux distributors, who are committing to building lightweight Linux kernels that will run inside the Hyper-V containers.
