Red Hat Linux: Now with Microsoft's Hyper-V drive Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 5.9 has landed with some cloudy love from Microsoft. The latest version of the Linux distro, released Tuesday, introduces drivers for Microsoft’s closed-source Hyper-V hypervisor rival to VMware’s vSphere. The inclusion of Microsoft’s drivers means improved interoperability and manageability for …
Yes, most of the time I run Windows on Xen or something like that, but I do have a few instances of the other way around.
In once case I run a small CentOS instance in Hyper-V on a 2008 Domain Controller. It runs a few scripts like MRTG, RRDTool, Smokeping, and some other SNMP stuff monitoring network metrics and performance. It was easier for me to set up Linux then try to have the commands work in Windows.
> Run windows as a guest on 'nix.
That's how I'd do it, given the choice - but you don't always get that choice. Sometimes, you go into a site which already has Windows-based virtualisation in place. Running up a G/L installation on top of that means you get a *nix platform for whatever you might need without having to go through the political bullshit involved in building a new phsyical server instance different to what the company uses elsewhere.
So this is good news for everyone, even if it's a technology I'd personally rather avoid if at all possible...
Vic.
For any but the most purist Windows shops, virtualization on Windows was never an attracting idea. Onto the other hand, the purist Windows shop certainly don't want to have anything to do with *nix in general.
So, any of you can come up with a conspiracy theory on this matter ?
No siree! Serious studies have shown that some Wintel admins are getting deeply depressed and suicidal when confronted with a rectangular block mouse cursor on a 80 x 24 text screens. Starting an X session managed to increase chances of recovery as long as a fake icon of Internet Explorer with soothing effect was displayed on the desktop.
Anonymous cowards can't chose their icon but they are allowed to post humorous comments.
There was already a "HyperV guest tools" ISO image for RHEL, and could be hacked to work on Ubuntu. It would put the drivers for the virtual network card, virtual HDD and something else I can't remember. RHEL only added it to the stock drivers in the distro, I'd guess.
We were running RHEL 5 boxes on Hyper-V on Windows 2008 Server since we had a bunch of virtualized Windows servers. This was possible with dkms before 5.9; see http://serverfault.com/questions/258362/installing-integration-services-for-hyper-v-into-centos-5-x for details.
Unfortunately it was quite slow. RHEL6 was even slower. Then came the drama about the Hyper-V bits being booted out of the kernel because Microsoft didn't maintain them.
Fast forward to today, and we're running Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (Red Hat's repackaged version of oVirt http://www.ovirt.org/Home ). Linux is snappy snappy on KVM and Windows runs on it fine, as well. Good-bye, Hyper-V.
So the integrated components in 5.9 may help some poor slobs still running RHEL5 in a mostly-Windows shop, but we've moved on.
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