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-- Ben Armstrong, Virtualization Program Manager

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Linux is now supported under Virtual Server

MSDN Blogs > Virtual PC Guy's Blog > Linux is now supported under Virtual Server

Linux is now supported under Virtual Server

3 Apr 2006 4:01 PM
  • Comments 8

Hey hey! We are now 'supporting' Linux under Virtual Server (most of you will know that we have always been able to run Linux - but now we are officially supporting it, which means that we are testing Linux, fixing bugs and accepting customer support calls with Linux virtual machines).

Microsoft is officially supporting the following distributions:

 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 (update 6)
 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (update 6)
 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
 Novell’s SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9
 Red Hat Linux 7.3
 Red Hat Linux 9.0
 Novell’s SuSE Linux 9.2
 Novell’s SuSE Linux 9.3
 Novell’s SuSE Linux 10.0

Also - Virtual Machine Additions for Linux are now available for download from http://www.microsoft.com/virtualserver.  These additions provide support for:

  • Improved video
  • Integrated mouse pointer
  • Time synchronization
  • Shutdown integration
  • Heartbeat reporting
  • Accelerated SCSI driver

Note - it is possible to install these additions under Virtual PC - but that is neither officially tested nor supported (and that is all I can say about that :-).

Cheers,
Ben

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Comments
  • Pat Thoyts
    4 Apr 2006 7:42 AM
    An amusing error on the Linux additions page:

    "Linux Guest Support for Virtual Server 2005 R2
    Published: April 3, 2006

    Download the Virtual Machine Additions for Linux, available from Microsoft Connect, to improve the experience of running qualified Linux distributions on Virtual Server 2003 R2."

    2003? :)
  • Jerry
    4 Apr 2006 12:16 PM
    vmadditions for linux works with Virtual pc.

    We're running Fedora as a guest and after installing it shows you 2 crosses right beside the normal mousecursor... don't know why...

    O...and copy the contents of the mounted ISO to a folder on your harddisk within the guest, because you have to chmod 777 the vmadd-run script to run it which won't work on a read only mount.

    restart X (or reboot the VM) after that.

    It'll give you a [failed] but continues, when Linux is trying to load the vmadd-scsi module... because that's a Virtual Server thing.
  • Rich
    6 Apr 2006 9:37 AM
    "which means that we are testing Linux, fixing bugs and accepting customer support calls with Linux virtual machines"

    Can you expand on that a little?  Trying to get ubuntu distribution working.  Totally locks up with virtual SCSI drives (IDE works fine).  The graphical login screen loads up in 1600x600 (I specified 1024x768) and its totally garbled and unreadable.

    Obviously not one of the supported distributions, but I'm not sure where to formally log issues with Microsoft to help testing.
  • joe
    6 Apr 2006 2:30 PM
    Any thoughts on BSD?
  • Kashif
    6 Apr 2006 3:42 PM
    I can not download the additions. The link provided here just takes me to a program participation request and even after my participation is activated, there is no link to download.

    Where did you guys download from?
  • Roe
    8 Apr 2006 9:28 AM
    It seems they want you to jump through several hoops, and then wait an unspecified amount of time, before you can download this.

    Bizarre.
  • Daniel
    18 Apr 2006 4:05 AM
    I registered and got an email next day saying I could download the additions for Linux.
  • David Moisan
    26 Apr 2006 12:21 AM
    The instructions aren't clear on this but to install the VM additions you will need to have the kernel sources and cpp (and binutils) on the VM (IOW, you must be able to compile a kernel on the VM) as it needs to compile a kernel module..  
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