8.3. Running Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a Guest Virtual Machine on a Hyper-V Hypervisor
It is possible to run a Red Hat Enterprise Linux guest virtual machine on a Microsoft Windows host physical machine running the Microsoft Windows Hyper-V hypervisor. In particular, the following enhancements have been made to allow for easier deployment and management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux guest virtual machines:
- Upgraded VMBUS protocols - VMBUS protocols have been upgraded to Windows 8 level. As part of this work, now VMBUS interrupts can be processed on all available virtual CPUs in the guest. Furthermore, the signaling protocol between the Red Hat Enterprise Linux guest virtual machine and the Windows host physical machine has been optimized.
- Synthetic frame buffer driver - Provides enhanced graphics performance and superior resolution for Red Hat Enterprise Linux desktop users.
- Live Virtual Machine Backup support - Provisions uninterrupted backup support for live Red Hat Enterprise Linux guest virtual machines.
- Dynamic expansion of fixed size Linux VHDs - Allows expansion of live mounted fixed size Red Hat Enterprise Linux VHDs.
For more information, refer to the following article: Enabling Linux Support on Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V.
Note
The Hyper-V hypervisor supports shrinking a GPT-partitioned disk on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux guest 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 produce error messages when the 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 after shrinking the GPT disk by using the expert menu in gdisk and the e command. Furthermore, using the "expand" option in the Hyper-V manager also places the GPT secondary header in a location other than at the end of disk, but this can be moved with parted. See the gdisk and parted man pages for more information on these commands.
