Beta integration components have been announced for getting FreeBSD 8.2 running as a guest OS on Windows Server Hyper-V.
Microsoft and partners NetApp and Citrix are excited to announce the availability of FreeBSD support for Windows Server Hyper-V.
The source code can be found on Github here, as well as instructions for building from source and running the drivers can be found here.
Please note the word beta. This was not pointed out in the original Microsoft Openness announcement.
CentOS, RHEL, and SLES are officially supported OS’s on Hyper-V outside the Windows space. Ubuntu “works” with the 12.04 release having the Linux Integration Services built in. It appears that post-beta, FreeBSD 8.2 will join Ubuntu in the “it works” category. I can’t imply support from Hyper-V due to the wording of the Microsoft Openness announcement title “FreeBSD Support for Windows Server Hyper-V”. It does not say “Windows Server Hyper-V Support for FreeBSD” which would be more meaningful.
More notes from the Port25 blog:
The FreeBSD drivers are being prepared for inclusion in the FreeBSD core, and there will soon be available ISO images with preinstalled drivers for the latest releases of FreeBSD (based on community feedback).
That leads us to believe that v8.3 and v9.0 of FreeBSD will also support Hyper-V – again note that I did not say that Hyper-V would support FreeBSD because that has not been announced.
Configure the Hyper-V VM as follows:
- Set memory to no less than 2048MB
- Do not configure the network at this step
- Set the virtual hard disk to no more than 30GB
- Select the .iso FreeBSD file to install the operating system
- After the virtual machine is created, go to Settings page, remove the default Network Adapter and add the Legacy Network Adapter.
- Connect the network to external network.
- Start the virtual machine
The integration services offer the following functionality:
- Driver support: The network controller and the IDE and SCSI storage controllers.
- Timesync
- Integrated Shutdown
- Heartbeat: Allows the host to detect if the virtual machine is running and responsive
Instructions for installing the beta integration components can be found here.
EDIT:
I’ve completely rewritten this post due to the poor quality of the original announcement by Microsoft Openness that had me confused. My apologies if my original version of this article mislead you in any way.