Become a Hyper-V administrator and sooner or later someone wants you to run Linux. Hyper-V has support to run is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 SP1, 10 SP2 or 11, x86 or x64 as well as RedHat 5.2, and 5.3 with no IC’s. Performance is important to me so I want my VM’s to have Integration Components. That limits me to SLES 10 and 11.
If you are running Hyper-V then management is probably important to you. You’re probably running some components of Microsoft System Center, even Operations Manager 2007 R2. OpsMgr 2007 R2 has cross platform extensions, i.e. the ability to monitor Linux and UNIX physical and virtual machines using Microsoft written agents and management packs (optionally supplemented by 3rd party management packs).
OpsMgr 2007 R2 supports the following non-Microsoft operating systems:
- AIX 5.3 (Power), 6.1 (Power)
- HP-UX 11iv2 (PA-RISC and IA64), and 11iv3 (PA-RISC and IA64)
- Red Hat Enterprise Server 4 (x64 and x86) and 5 (x64 and x86)
- Solaris 8 (SPARC), 9 (SPARC) and 10 (SPARC and x86 versions later than 120012-14)
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (x86) and 10 SP1 (x86 and x64)
If you draw a Venn diagram then you’ll see your options for an optimal solution are starting to dwindle … rapidly. The common MS supported operating systems for Hyper-V and Operations Manager 2007 R2 are:
- 10 SP1 (x86 and x64)
Maybe I should have said “is” instead of “are”.
So, if you are running Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, then I’d recommend that you choose SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 as your Linux of choice. Yes, it is a bit old. Hyper-V has kept up to date but OpsMgr has lagged behind a little.
EDIT #1
Microsoft added support for running RHEL with integration components with the version 2 release of the IC’s for Hyper-V.