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”. To try this out for myself – I grabbed the 32-bit desktop install media from Ubuntu.com and fired up a virtual machine:
After the initial splash screen, I was pleasantly surprised by the first indication of the improved Hyper-V support. Before even install Ubuntu, on the first page of setup, I already had integrated mouse support.
I chose to Install Ubuntu and was then presented with a page that confirmed that I had enough space, and I had a valid internet connection. This was also interesting to note, as I had not added a legacy network adapter to the virtual machine. This meant that Ubuntu had already recognized and loaded drivers for the Hyper-V high-performance network adapter.
After this – the installation was fairly pedestrian…
The only quirk I encountered was that at the end of the initial installation phase – the virtual machine failed to reboot automatically. It sat at this page for about a minute until I manually reset it:
But after that it booted perfectly:
And I confirmed that applications and network connectivity was working correctly:
My favorite part of this was seeing this message:
“No proprietary drivers are in use on this system”. Correct! The Hyper-V drivers are now part of Linux, under GPL.
Cheers,
Ben
from Virtual PC Guy's Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/b/virtual_pc_guy/
