RTM of Linux Integration Components for Hyper-V Now Available:

After a short delay, the RTM build of the Linux Integration Components for Hyper-V can now be downloaded from connect.microsoft.com (You need to register for this - but registration is free and easy).

These integration components contain some critical features:

High performance I/O drivers for networking and disk (both IDE and SCSI) for Linux under Hyper-V.
An integrated video / mouse driver for Linux under Hyper-V.
The kernel “Hypercall adapter”.

A number of people have asked me what this last item is, so let me explain.  Hyper-V and Xen (an open source hypervisor based virtualization solution that you are probably aware of) have very similar architectures - despite being developed in isolation from each other.  The hypercall adapter is basically a layer that translates between the Xen hypercall API and the Hyper-V hypercall API.  This allows you to install a Xen paravirtualized Linux kernel inside the virtual machine in order to get the best performance possible.

With this release we are still only supporting SuSE Linux - however you can search the connect newsgroup to see posts from users who have successfully installed the Linux integration components on other versions of Linux.

Cheers,
Ben

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Versions available for Windows XP, 2003 and Windows Vista. The Windows Vista version also appears to work just fine on Windows Server 2008.

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Since VMware Fusion v2 is supposed to be at least VM format and functionality on par with VMware Workstation, I wondered whether or not I could get Fusion to run ESX as well using David’s work as a starting point. With a few minor variations to account for the differences between VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion, it worked perfectly.

First, follow David’s walkthrough step-by-step but using VMware Fusion instead. For example:

Step #1: Create a new VM Select “Continue without a disk” when prompted.

Step #2: Select “Create a custom virtual machine”.

Step #3: Select “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 64-bit” as the OS type.

Step #4: Choose “Customize Settings”.

Step #5: Choose a name and location for the virtual machine. Then click “Finish” to create the virtual machine.

Step #6: Once the VM is created, edit its settings to remove unnecessary devices like sound, sharing, printers, etc. Then ensure that the disk type is SCSI and adjust its size as appropriate.

Step #7: Once you’ve configured the virtual machine, exit VMware Fusion. You must now add a new line to the VM’s VMX file to allow VMs to run within a VM. Without this, you will be able to install ESX but when you try to power on a VM under ESX within Fusion you will get an error. David walks through how to do this on Windows in the video. For OS X and VMware Fusion, browse within the Finder to the location where you saved the VM you just created. Right-click or CTRL-click on the file and select “Show Package Contents”. Browse to the VMX file and open it up within TextEdit. Make the same change that David refers to in the video and then save the VMX file. (Add monitor_console.restrict_backdoor = “TRUE” to the file.)

Step #8: Attach the installation ISO for ESX or ESXi to the VM and start it up. Install each product normally. Here’s what mine looked like after installing ESX 3i:

Step #9: If at some point you receive an error message like the one below, you must enter an Administrator password to continue. I believe this is because ESX running within the VM is attempting to put the virtual NIC into some sort of promiscuous mode to take control of it for use by the vSwitch. Not an ESX expert so I don’t know for sure. But if you accept this, everything works fine.