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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.

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Enter below text, save and close

NETWORKING=yes

 

 

Now Run ifup eth0 and you should be connected to network or else take a reboot.

 

 

With this our CentOS/RHEL/Scientific Linux 6.2 can take full advantage of Hyper-V synthetic drivers and is ready for production :)