-- Ben Armstrong, Hyper-V Program Manager
Talking about Virtual PC and Hyper-V at Microsoft
Yesterday we released a new version of the Linux Integration Services for Hyper-V. You can download them directly from here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28188
Some key changes / new features to call out are:
For more details, check out the link and read the documentation.
Cheers, Ben
The other day I was trying to boot a virtual machine over the network using my Windows Deployment Services (WDS) Server. This normally works fine – but for some reason I was getting nothing but errors. Sometimes I would get a DHCP failure, other times I received varied PXE error messages:
After some investigation I stumbled on to the problem. There was a MAC address conflict. While Hyper-V will not let MAC address conflicts happen on a single server – but you can still have conflicts happen between multiple Hyper-V servers. John Howard has talked about this extensively here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/jhoward/archive/2008/07/15/hyper-v-mac-address-allocation-and-apparent-network-issues-mac-collisions-can-cause.aspx
Once I realized what was happening – I quickly changed the virtual machine to use a static MAC address and set the MAC address to a unique value:
Then network installation worked fine.
We have a great group of Hyper-V MVPs who contribute greatly to our users. Recently there have been some interesting posts about running different operating systems under Hyper-V.
Last Thursday, Alessandro Cardoso posted a detailed guide to installing RedHat 6.1 and setting up the latest integration services. You can read about that here: http://virtualisationandmanagement.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/hyper-v-detailed-step-by-step-installing-redhat-6-1-vm-in-expert-mode-with-the-new-linux-integration-services-3-1/
Then on the following day, Lai Yoong Seng post a video that shows you how to get Android running inside of a Hyper-V virtual machine: http://www.ms4u.info/2011/08/running-android-on-hyper-v.html
Neat stuff!
Last week we released an update for the Linux Integration Services for Hyper-V. You can download the 3.1 release here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26837
Key details are that this release supports the following Linux distributions:
It also provides support for the “KVP” feature of Hyper-V (I have yet to play with this under Linux, and am hoping to soon, but you can read about KVPs in a number of posts that I have made in the past).
Finally this release includes RPM based installers, which is certainly convenient.
One extra thing to note – if you are running SLES 10 SP3 / 11, or RHEL 5.2 / 5.3 / 5.4 / 5.5 you will need to continue to use the previous release of the Linux Integration Services – which can be downloaded from here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=24247
Now that the Hyper-V integration services are included in the official Linux builds – I wanted to try out a Linux distribution that is not officially supported by Microsoft and see what was involved in getting it all working. With the recent release of Ubuntu 10.10 I thought I would try out their server version. After downloading the bits from http://www.ubuntu.com/server I created a quad-processor virtual machine with a non-legacy network adapter.
Installation was fairly straight forward:
However – Ubuntu does not have the Hyper-V enlightened network drivers enabled by default – so the installation complains about not being able to find any network adapters:
But I just ignored that and moved along with the install:
I chose the default packages for setting up a LAMP server:
The install finished and I was dropped at the login prompt:
A cool thing to note was that at this stage I could already shut down the virtual machine by using the shutdown button on the Virtual Machine Connection window, so part of the integration services are already running. You can also see that all four virtual processors are there and working:
Getting the Hyper-V drivers up and running at this point in time is actually relatively simple. The first thing you need to do is to edit /etc/initramfs-tools/modules and add the following lines to the end of it:
hv_vmbus
hv_storvsc
hv_blkvsc
hv_netvsc
Once you have made these changes you will need to run “update-initramfs –u” and reboot. You will now have the Hyper-V drivers for storage and networking loaded:
You can confirm that these drivers are loaded by running “lsmod” after the reboot:
The final thing you need to do is to configure networking (because that step was skipped during installation). The first thing to do is to run “ifconfig –a” to find out what name your network adapter has been given. In my case it was “eth0” – but this is not always the name it will get. Once you know the name you will need to edit /etc/network/interfaces and add the following to the end of the file:
For DHCP (what I did):
auto eth0 iface eth0 inet dhcp
For a Static IP address:
auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static address [insert your IP address] netmask [insert your netmask] Gateway [insert your gateway address] Like this:
One more reboot and running “ifconfig” should confirm that everything is working:
And in my case I could also confirm that the website was accessible from my parent partition as well:
So there you have it. Ubuntu Server 10.10 running under Hyper-V with full integration services using nothing other than what is included on the Ubuntu install media.
Over on the virtualization team blog – Mike Sterling has just announced the availability of the Linux Integration Services v2.1. And there is a lot to announce here. Along with the previous support for our high performance virtual storage and network adapters – this release brings in the following new features:
These integration services are supported on the following guest operating systems:
You can download the integration services here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=eee39325-898b-4522-9b4c-f4b5b9b64551
Windows Virtual PC only officially supports Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 as guest operating systems. Thankfully it has great compatibility and can run many operating systems that are not officially supported.
I recently needed to setup a Windows 98 virtual machine for my wife – who has some genealogy software that will not even run on Windows XP. To do this I created a new virtual machine and configured it with 64mb of RAM and a 16GB virtual hard disk.
I was then able to install Windows 98 with no real problems:
Some things to be aware of when doing this:
After installation both networking and sound work correctly – but the video is kind of “sucky” and you need to capture / release the mouse whenever you use the virtual machine. Luckily you can address both of these issues by installing older virtual machine additions in the virtual machine. Doing this will give you:
But you will not get:
But how do you do this? The trick is to extract the old virtual machine additions out of a previous product. In my case I decided to get the virtual machine additions out of Virtual Server 2005 R2. To do this what you will need to do is:
At this stage you should start up your Windows 98 virtual machine and login. Then attach the VMAdditions.iso file to the virtual machine. The virtual machine additions installer should start automatically inside the virtual machine:
After this you will need to reboot the virtual machine.
With all this in place – some parting notes that I have are:
The other day I setup a virtual machine running SmoothWall Express 3.0 under Hyper-V. If you are not familiar with this OS – let me be lazy and quote Wikipedia:
SmoothWall is a Linux distribution designed to be used as an open source firewall. Designed for ease of use, SmoothWall is configured via a web-based GUI, and requires little or no knowledge of Linux to install or use.
I wanted to play around with it to see if I could set it up as a filtering proxy; so I downloaded the installation ISO file and tried to install it in a Hyper-V virtual machine.
I created a virtual machine with 512MB RAM, a 127GB dynamically expanding virtual hard disk, 1 CPU and two legacy network adapters connected to different networks.
For the most part, it “just worked”. The installation was a very traditional Linux installation process (contrary to the Wikipedia quote above) and I only encountered two hiccups:
But I now have it up and running perfectly:
And it is functioning as a filtering proxy. Now I just have to wade through mountains of configuration files to actually get it to filter the right things :-)
We have just released the beta of the next version of the Linux integration services. This release brings some much wanted and requested new functionality to our Linux support on Hyper-V. Specifically it brings:
This release is currently available on Connect (http://connect.microsoft.com) under the “Linux Integration Services for Microsoft Hyper-V” connection (which you can go and sign up for right now).
This release is supported on all versions of Hyper-V out there – namely:
It is officially supported for the following versions of Linux:
This new functionality will also be submitted shortly to the Linux kernel – so that it should hopefully appear in your favorite Linux distribution soon.
We have not updated Virtual PC 2007 to add support for running Windows 7 as a guest operating system at this point in time. However, this is possible to do – with two important caveats:
So what do you need to do? Well the process is quite simple. The first thing is that when you create a new virtual machine – you should select Windows Vista as the guest operating system:
This ensures that the right virtual hardware is configured for the virtual machine. You can then install Windows 7 directly into the virtual machine with no special steps needed. After Windows has finished installing you will be able to install the virtual machine additions that are included with Virtual PC 2007 SP1. After this stage you should have all the integration functionality and drivers for all the devices in the virtual machine:
So why do you need hardware virtualization support for good performance? Well, virtual machine additions breakdown into two parts:
Microsoft only supports Windows 7 on Windows Virtual PC when hardware virtualization is present. And while Windows 7 is not supported on Virtual PC 2007 – in order to get decent performance you need hardware virtualization there as well.
Two closing notes to be made: