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If you install Ubuntu 14.04 inside a Hyper-V virtual machine – you automatically get all the integration components and virtualized drivers.  Including the Hyper-V video driver.  However, if you try to change the screen resolution inside your virtual machine you will notice something odd: There...

A couple of weeks ago I posted about the fact that Windows Server 2012 R2 is not supported on top of Windows Server 2008 R2 . This generated a lot of feedback about the need to improve our documentation for which operating systems are supported on which versions of Hyper-V. So the Hyper-V documentation...

I have been asked this question a couple of times recently.  The odd thing, to me anyway, is that most of the people who have asked me have stated: I read this article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794868(v=ws.10).aspx about supported guest operating systems for Windows Server 2008...

I was recently reading our documented Best Practices for running Linux on Hyper-V and noticed this section: Use I/O scheduler NOOP for better disk I/O performance. The Linux kernel has four different I/O schedulers to reorder requests with different algorithms. NOOP is a first-in first-out queue that...

We have been doing a lot of work to increase the functionality of Linux on top of Hyper-V, and we have been contributing the necessary changes directly to the main Linux source.  While this is all good – it has caused confusion for some people as they are trying to figure out which versions of Linux...

Recently, Canonical released Ubuntu 14.04.  This is the first Linux release to support running inside of a Generation 2 virtual machine.  To get this working in your environment, you need to have Windows 8.1 or Windows Server 2012 R2 installed.  Then you need to download an installation...

I make heavy use of group policy in my home environment.  It makes it very easy to push out defaults to all of my various computers and virtual machines.  However, there are times when I have a setting that I only want applied to virtual machines.  Luckily this is somewhat simple to do...

Last week, Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 (details here: http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2013/1/red-hat-announces-general-availability-of-red-hat-enterprise-linux-5-9 ).  Amongst the various improvements is built-in support for Hyper-V:...

Recently a number of the Hyper-V drivers for Linux made it into the main kernel branch.  This means that native support for Hyper-V is starting to turn up in a number of Linux distributions.  Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is an example of a new Linux release with Hyper-V support “out of the box”. ...

This is a post that I have been meaning to do for a while now: how to install Android 2.2 in Hyper-V.  While Android is designed for smart phones – there are a number of ports out there for running on standard computers.  Today I am going to show you how to get Android 2.2 running in a Hyper...

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: Integrated mouse support Yay!  This means that you no longer...

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...

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...

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: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 and 6.1 x86...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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: Support for running Linux with up to 4 vCPUs per virtual machine. A time synchronization...

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: You really need to have hardware virtualization support to get decent performance Understand that this is not...

Over the weekend I spent some time going through my dusty archives of a virtual machines, bringing them all across to Windows Virtual PC and making sure they were all up to date. One of the virtual machines that I worked on was a Windows XP Tablet Edition virtual machine (which I blogged about back in...

First, a caveat. This is not supported. Most of what I am about to talk about is not supported. Feel free to use this information, but do not call Microsoft if it does not work for you. With that out of the way – this morning I was asked how to get a Windows Server 2008 core installation working on...

(Stick with me on this one – it will take a while but I will bring this back to virtualization at the end of it all.  Oh – and be warned – this is a very long post.) This weekend I had a challenge to solve: A while ago I bought myself one of the original EEEPC netbooks (with teeny tiny screen and...

The release candidate 2 version of the second generation of the Linux integration components for Hyper-V are now available for download.  You can get the bits from here: https://connect.microsoft.com/SelfNomination.aspx?ProgramID=1863&pageType=1&SiteID=495 These integration components support...

The Hyper-V integration component drivers for Linux have now been formally released under the GPLv2 license.  They are currently available in Greg Kroah-Hartman's tree (aka, the Linux Driver Project ).  These are the Linux drivers for VMBus and for our VMBus based network and storage devices...