Virtualizing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 on Hyper-V

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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 ships with Microsoft's Linux Integration Services, a set of drivers that enable synthetic device support in supported virtualized operating systems. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 provides the following drivers virtualizing Red Hat Enterprise Linux on a Hyper-V host:

  • hv_vmbus - a main paravirtualized driver for communicating with the Hyper-V host
  • hv_netvsc - a paravirtualized network driver
  • hv_storvsc - a paravirtualized storage (SCSI) driver
  • hyperv_fb - a paravirtualized framebuffer device
  • hyperv_keyboard - a paravirtualized keyboard driver
  • hid_hyperv - a paravirtualized mouse driver
  • hv_balloon -a memory hotplug and ballooning driver
  • hv_utils - a guest integration services driver

For more information about the drivers provided, refer to Microsoft's website and the Linux and FreeBSD Virtual Machines on Hyper-V article in particular. More information on the Hyper-V feature set, is located in Feature Descriptions for Linux and FreeBSD virtual machines on Hyper-V.

Another article which may be helpful is: Enabling Linux Support on Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V. Access to this article may require a Microsoft account.

The Hyper-V manager supports shrinking a GUID Partition Table (GPT) partitioned disk if there is free space after the last partition, by allowing the user to drop the unused last part of the disk. However, this operation will silently delete the secondary GPT header on the disk, which may trigger error messages when guest examines the partition table (for example, when printing the partition table with parted). This is a known limit of Hyper-V. As a workaround, it is possible to manually restore the secondary GPT header with the gdisk expert command e, after shrinking the GPT disk. This also occurs when using Hyper-V's Expand option, but can also be fixed with the parted tool. Information about these commands can be viewed in the parted(8) and gdisk(8) man pages.

For more information, see the following article: Best Practices for running Linux on Hyper-V.

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