[Dailydave] Hyper-V

[Dave Aitel]

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So recently I installed Hyper-V RC1 on a Windows Server 2008 machine and 
I wanted to share my experience. Essentially modern Linux that is not 
Ubuntu is hard to install on anything, since half the time it doesn't 
see your CDRom and half the time it doesn't see your SATA hard drive. 
This is also true with installing Linux on Hyper-V in my experience. 
Fedora, Centos, etc. all failed. I'm not man enough to install Gentoo, 
but I assume it works. Ubuntu 7.10 does NOT work. It won't even boot - 
this is a known bug in Ubuntu and not Hyper-V's fault. Nothing installed 
on Hyper-V except Ubuntu 8.04. And yes, I tried all sorts of kernel 
options on the init line. (See below for details of various attempts)

However, Ubuntu 8.4 works great, as long as you have the "legacy network 
adapter" installed. The text framebuffer linux uses is really really 
slow under Hyper-V, which makes installing it a bit weird, but once 
you've got the system installed you don't really care. And it can do 
snapshots and all the other things we've come to expect from a modern 
hypervisor.

If you google for information on Hyper-V, you really don't find anything 
useful, but for future users: Just go straight to Ubuntu 8.04 + legacy 
network adapters and you'll be ok.

Other notes:

You may think you can get the SuSE drivers to work with Linux so you 
don't need the legacy adapter. This is not true. To get the fast 
networking you need to install a Xen kernel, and then some special 
drivers, and it's just going to be hell on earth unless every linux 
vendor does a U-turn and starts supporting Hyper-V specifically. It's 
not a real option now for anyone but a Microsoft engineer. The "howto" 
Microsoft provides is a Office 2007 document, which you can read in 
OpenOffice 2.3 or above, but which should be a ODF/PDF since people 
doing this don't all have Office 2007.

That document says to do this, once you have the integration tools on 
your Linux machine:
./setup.pl drivers /boot/grub/menu.lst

What they really meant was just ./setup.pl drivers, which will say 
success even when it fails.


Networking not working? :
modprobe -v tulip to get the emulated legacy dec network driver up and 
running if Ubuntu doesn't see it immediately.


Specific boot issues for the record:
Fedora 9 and Centos 5.1 (x64) both fail trying to find the CDRom drive 
after loading the kernel successfully. (ATA issue? For what it's worth 
they have the same issue on our real-iron server).

With CentOS I tried to set it up for network install, but it failed to 
DHCP off the legacy network controller.

OpenSuse 10.3 x64 can't even load the installer (same bug as Ubuntu 7.10)


- -dave

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