Microsoft Hyper-V Leaves Linux Out In The Cold

whitehartstag writes to mention that Microsoft has announced their new Hyper-V as feature-complete. Unfortunately the list of supported systems is disappointingly short. "No offense to SUSE Enterprise Server crowd, but only providing SUSE support in Hyper-V is a huge mistake. By not supporting Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, and BSD, Microsoft is telling us Hyper-V is a Microsoft only technology. More Mt. Redmond, Microsoft center of the universe thinking. That's disappointing. Sure, if you are a Microsoft only shop, Hyper-V will be an option for virtualization. But so will VMware and XenServer. But if you run a mixed shop, Hyper-V won't solve your problems alone — you'll have to also add VMware or Xen to your virtualized data center portfolio. Or just go with VMware and Xen and forego Hyper-V."

Overblown

[Ed Avis]

What a storm in a teacup. Will anyone except Microsoft shops want to run Microsoft's virtualization product? Will they care that Debian isn't a 'supported platform', whatever that means? It's not as if other Linux versions won't run; just you won't be able to get Microsoft's famously good technical support to help with setting them up.

Re:WTF does Microsoft know about virtualization?

[TheRaven64]

They own Connectix, which was one of two companies offering a decent desktop virtualisation package a few years ago. They also got a good x86 emulator in the deal.

Troll article

[recoiledsnake]

Hyper-V is not a full fledged cpu/hardware emulator like VMWare and is more of a hypervisor which needs support from the client operating system (like Xen which they have a licencing deal with). This is because there are some hardware x86 instructions which conflict each other when run on two operating systems at the same time. So, there actually needs to be some client side code that needs to plug into the Linux kernel code. Right now, I guess only Novell has it in as they are MS's partner.

There could be several licensing problems with third party patents and licenses before releasing it as GPL. Or, it might not have been released now because Hyper-V has already been delayed a lot and the team must be in a hurry to push out the beta instead of testing it against every distribution of Linux in the wild.

Last of all, the headline. Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 isn't Linux? The headline should've said only SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was supported. Instead, we have a inflammatory headline designed to rake in the hits from angry visitors. And it worked.

Re:Hyper-V is what now?

[ArsonSmith]

It's a conglomeration of tech from Xen's Hypervisor and work done by citrix and Novell to make windows the DomU in Xen.

Re:Hyper-V is what now?

[Loconut1389]

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/virtualization-consolidation.aspx [microsoft.com]

"
Introducing Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V

Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the next-generation hypervisor-based server virtualization technology, allows you to make the best use of your server hardware investments by consolidating multiple server roles as separate virtual machines (VMs) running on a single physical machine. With Hyper-V, you can also efficiently run multiple different operating systems--Windows, Linux, and others--in parallel, on a single server, and fully leverage the power of x64 computing.

Key Features of Hyper-V:

        * New and Improved Architecture. New 64-bit micro-kernelized hypervisor architecture enables Hyper-V to provide a broad array of device support methods and improved performance and security.
        * Broad OS Support. Broad support for simultaneously running different types of operating systems, including 32-bit and 64-bit systems across different server platforms, such as Windows, Linux, and others.
        * Symmetric Multiprocessors (SMP) Support. Ability to support up to four multiple processors in a virtual machine environment enables you to take full advantage of multi-threaded applications in a virtual machine.
        * Network Load Balancing. Hyper-V includes new virtual switch capabilities. This means virtual machines can be easily configured to run with Windows Network Load Balancing (NLB) Service to balance load across virtual machines on different servers.
        * Hardware Sharing Architecture. With the new virtual service provider/virtual service client (VSP/VSC) architecture, Hyper-V provides improved access and utilization of core resources, such as disk, networking, and video.
        * Quick Migration. Hyper-V enables you to rapidly migrate a running virtual machine from one physical host system to another with minimal downtime, leveraging familiar high-availability capabilities of Windows Server and System Center management tools.
        * Virtual Machine Snapshot. Hyper-V provides the ability to take snapshots of a running virtual machine so you can easily revert to a previous state, and improve the overall backup and recoverability solution.
        * Scalability. With support for multiple processors and cores at the host level and improved memory access within virtual machines, you can now vertically scale your virtualization environment to support a large number of virtual machines within a given host and continue to leverage quick migration for scalability across multiple hosts.
        * Extensible. Standards-based Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) interfaces and APIs in Hyper-V enable independent software vendors and developers to quickly build custom tools, utilities, and enhancements for the virtualization platform.
"

Re:Let's not jump the gun...

[bguthro]

SuSe posted their patches [xensource.com] to the Xen-devel list mid-feb. If other distros want to take their patches, they would be able to run paravirtualized in Windows. The patches met with some resistance from the Xen developers - so if they get into upstream development remains to be seen..

Re:Hyper-V is what now?

[recoiledsnake]

The "article" appeared to be more of a comment than news.

You must be new here. The article was not posted because of content but because of the headline(which basically implies that Suse Enterprise Linux is not Linux, WTF?). Microsoft says in their pitch that Hyper-V supports Linux, and a random bloggers says they don't, at all. Both are wrong in their own way :(

Hook Patches

[tinkerghost]

According to some digging, it seems that SUSE has tweaked some XEN code to properly work with the MS Hypervisor. The patch isn't well accepted in the Xen-dev group & may not make it to the reference build.
So, anyone using the SuSE patch can run under this, but at the cost of loosing their supplied kernel.

Re:Little early

[andreyw]

The article is FUD. Clearly, "Linux" is supported. It just says that the only distro officially supported is SUSE. Everything else is in the "hey, I got it to work" domain. And seriously... it not their job to make sure it works with every distro. Their job is to make sure the linux kernel can run efficiently in it. That's it.

Re:WTF does Microsoft know about virtualization?

[recoiledsnake]

Stop letting off hot air on the dumbass article. See installing fedora core 8 on hyper-v [msdn.com]. Even Ubuntu server is being used by people on HyperV. SUSE is supported in the sense of calling up MS's support desk and talking to them about it. But Linux distributions work just fine. This is just MS's way of telling people that they're on their own if they try other distributions(this is usually true for Linux servers anyway).

Misinformed blogger makes a flamebait article that reads like ex-lover's childish rant complete with doomsday threats and with a inflammatory headline, the 'editor' doesn't do any editorial work and the hundreds of misguided comments below will just bash on MS and earn insightful, informative and interesting mod points. Also, this will be repeated in the comments in other articles as the gospel truth because most people don't even RTFA, forget about actually seeing if there is a grain of truth in it. In other words, just another day on Slashdot.

If you really want to know about Hyper V, go here [technet.com].

Re:Microsoft is using old rules in a new game

[nxtw]

Well put, I installed Win2008 Server last week to start doing some testing for a client and was surprised that the installation process puts games on the machine and has folders like My Pictures and My Music.

The installation process does not install games and picture/music playing software by default. You need to select the "Desktop Experience", which does install this kind of software.

I mean really, is this supposed to be a serious server operating system? If "yes" then why would you have such things installed? It makes no sense to me at all.

If the system is designed to be used as a terminal server, for example.

Re:WTF does Microsoft know about virtualization?

[afidel]

It doesn't matter. When we talked to MS about Hyper-V they flat out told us we weren't their target market (we're a smaller Fortune 500 company). They basically are targeting Hyper-V at the SMB shop that's outgrown the everything and the kitchen sink model of Windows SMB Server. They don't have the tools to manage large deployments efficiently and so they aren't that worried about the large shop that wants to run Solaris x86 and Linux on the same box. For large virtualization projects you're still looking at VMWare or Xen with the Xen stack looking to make a LOT of progress over the next year or two once the Citrix initiatives kick in.

Re:WTF does Microsoft know about virtualization?

[nuknuk]

Hewlett Packard only supports Red Hat Enterprise linux on their DL lines of server hardware. Does this mean that other versions of linux don't work on them? No. It just means that if you want to run something other than that, they do not have on-site tech support that can assist you. They have to pick their battles, and they chose Red Hat (in the case of HP) or they picked SUSE (in the case of Microsoft). Nothing unusual about this, you see this all the time at the enterprise level.

Re:Hyper-V is what now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite true--the hyper-v hypervisor is totally new, rather than being a cut down linux kernel (like Xen). It's written entirely by Microsoft. It does use Windows as the primary service/ hardware interface OS (not sure what MS calls it), serving the same purpose as the DomU in Xen. Looks like it also provides Xen APIs to guest operating systems. Not sure if the supported Windows operating systems use them or something else, although I imagine documentation is available somewhere.