Well, it took Microsoft long enough to accept the fact that no matter what they want, many companies plan to run productions versions of Red Hat Linux on Microsoft’s Hyper-V servers. Of course, it appears that Microsoft has built in limitations, presumably to try and discourage the use of the only real competitor they have in the operating system category. Even with the limitations, this is a major concession from Microsoft which recognizes that if they want to corner a bigger part of the virtualization market, they will have to provide built in support for competitors. If not, VMware will continue to dominate the market.

The new drivers support RHEL versions 5.2, 5.2 and 5.4 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server SP2 and 11 versions x84 and x64. Way back in October Microsoft and Red Hat joined each others virtualization partnership programs and validated that their products worked on each others virtual machines.

What Took Microsoft so Long to Release the Drivers to the Public?

According to Microsoft’s Vijay Tewari, principal program manager for the Windows Virtualization Team, “The delay was caused by one issue: the two companies hadn’t worked out a deal on who would support the Red Hat operating system if it was running as a Hyper-V guest.”

Apparently, the matter was resolved and the new drivers are available for download.

New Diver Limitations

No one really knows why but the new drivers have several limitations such as:

Only One Virtual Processor Allowed – Red Hat and SUSE are limited to one virtual processor on Hyper-V. Meanwhile Windows server 2008 R2 gets to use 4 virtual processors and Windows Server 2003 gets to use 2.

According to Tewari, Microsoft is working to increase the number of virtual processors available to the Linux operating systems

Limited Mouse Support – the driver components don’t provide mouse support for remote access. Citrix has produced an add-on called Project Satori that has fixed the problem.  Without Satori, no mouse is available if you remote into the virtual machine and launch the console of the guest operating system.

Microsoft claims the problems are due to the Linux community making changes to the kernel and that the drivers were not designed to work with the latest kernel version 2.6.33. However, they work just fine with versions 2.5.18 and 2.6.27.

Apparently, Citrix engineers have a better understanding of how to write more generic drivers for Linux kernels.

Summary

Regardless of the limitations, it good to see that Microsoft is finally cooperating with other operating system companies to make the computing environment more flexible and able to meet the needs of more business than before.