Linux – Run Linux on Hyper-V Server

hyper-vlinux

I'm planning to host a few Linux servers on commodity hardware (the one I can buy from newegg.com for less than $1,000). I had very bad experience regarding hardware support in Linux. I'm not sure whether the network adapter or chip-set driver is available in Linux or fully tested. I'm thinking of a work-around of running Linux as a guest OS on a Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (the Hypervisor itself is free). Hyper-V provides unified hardware for guest OS. Linux can fully utilize the host resources with Integration Component driver installed.

  1. How much overhead is it in running Linux on a hypervisor? Does someone run a benchmark against physical machine vs virtual machine?
  2. Is IC driver ready for production use?

Best Answer

Hyper-V does support Linux as a guest OS, but being it a Microsoft platform, it's obviously more focused on Windows compatibility; here is the official list of supported guest OSes:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794868(WS.10).aspx

It could be worth noting that VMware ESXi is also free, and it has a much broader guest OS support (apart from being the market leader in virtualization and a generally much more mature product than Hyper-V).

Also, Hyper-V Server is somewhat painful to manage if you don't have System Center Virtual Machine Manager available: it has no GUI (the physical console can only be used for basic administration), the remote Hyper-V MMC only runs on Windows 7, and if you don't have an Active Directory domain around, things can get tricky. ESXi is much more user friendly, as long as you have at least one Windows PC (XP or later) where you can run the vSphere Client.