Saturday, April 28, 2012

Ubuntu 12.04 has Hyper-V support Built-in

The latest release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Long Term Support) code named Precise Pangolin from Canonical has many new features as in with any new release improving stability and speed. The interesting addition that will excite Microsoft shops and fans is built in support for Hyper-V eliminating the need to install Microsoft Linux Integration Components inside Ubuntu 12.04 when deployed as a VM

 

Ubuntu-1

 

image

 

As you can see in the above screenshots the kernel version is 3.2 which has Hyper-V IC modules and detects all Hyper-V synthetic devices like NIC, SCSI storage, has mouse integration and supports multiple vCPUs out of the box.

 

Hope to see other Linux distributions do the same soon.

 

Useful links

Click here to know more about Ubuntu new release and download links

Ubuntu home page

Click here to download 32 bit Desktop ISO image (701 MB)

Click here to download 64 bit Desktop ISO image (698 MB)

Click here for my earlier post on Linux IC and Hyper-V

Click here to know more about Pangolin

Monday, April 23, 2012

How do we heal medicine ? Well Use Checklists

Here is a very interesting TED talk by Dr. Atul Gawande, a Surgeon and Journalist, saying
“Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try”
He says Medicine has become very complex today and we need pit crews with checklists as in other fields of technology to make it better.



Have patience and listen to this 19 Mins talk :)

Thank you for your time.

Useful Links:
More about Atul Gawande here at TED Profile
Atul Gawande’s Website - http://gawande.com/
At TED here

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

RHEL/CentOS on Hyper-V 2k8 R2 with LIC v3.2

Microsoft Officially supports RedHat, CentOS and SUSE Linux Distributions as VMs running on Hyper-V. Linux Integration Components (LIC) or Linux Integration Services are the software components released by Microsoft that need to be installed on Linux VMs to take full advantage of Hyper-V features.
 
  • Linux Integration Components are a set of drivers that enable synthetic device support in supported Linux virtual machines running on Microsoft Hyper-V
These components when installed on Linux mainly provide below features
 
1. Drivers : Synthetic network controller (NIC), IDE and SCSI storage controllers support
2. Time sync : Clock inside the virtual machine will be in synch with the clock on the Host
3. Integrated Shutdown : Shut down from either Hyper-V Manager or SCVMM
4. Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) Support : Support up to 4 virtual processors Per VM
5. Heartbeat : Allows Host to detect if the virtual machine is running and responsive
6. Integrated Mouse Support : Seamless mouse integration when used with the Linux GUI
 
If Linux IC are not installed one might be presented with one or all of the below errors
 
CEntOS-00
 
CEntOS-01
 
CEntOS-02
 
Note: This post assumes that one has install CentOS/RHEL/Scientific Linux 6.2 on HyperV and has mounted Linux IC v3.2.iso onto DVD Drive of VM. If not please follow link below this post for Picture guide of CentOS server minimal installation
 
The documentation available along with LIC v3.2 looks good, but, unfortunately when trying to install you will get an error similar to the below one
 
ls: cannot access kmod-hyper-v-rhel6-43.1.x86_64.rpm: no such file or directory
ls: cannot access hyper-v-rhel6-43.1.x86_64.rpm: no such file or directory RPM’s are missing
 
There is a simple work around to this by changing the working directory to the mount point of Linux IC drive and invoking ./install.sh script.
 
LIC-Error
 
Below are the commands to run to install Linux IC and reboot, once prompted, as shown in the above screenshot
 
mount /dev/cdrom /media
 
cd /media
 
./install.sh
 
reboot
 
When VM is rebooted you will notice that there is no network connectivity to your VM. Follow steps below for configuring network connectivity
vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
 
Press i Key on keyboard and type the below lines
DEVICE="eth0"
ONBOOT="yes"
HWADDR=
TYPE=Ethernet
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
NAME="System eth0"
 
HWADDR is the MAC address of the NIC that can be found from settings menu of VM in Hyper-V (Below screenshot for your reference) and DHCP is the mode of getting IP Address
 
CEntOS-27b
 
Now use below Key Combination to save the file and close
Esc
Shift + :
wq
Enter
 
Use the below commands to edit, Save and close one more file
vi /etc/sysconfig/network
 
CEntOS-27c
 
Enter below text, save and close
NETWORKING=yes
 
CEntOS-27d
 
Now Run ifup eth0 and you should be connected to network or else take a reboot.
 
CEntOS-27e
 
With this our CentOS/RHEL/Scientific Linux 6.2 can take full advantage of Hyper-V synthetic drivers and is ready for production :)
 
Useful Links:-