Installing Hyper-V Linux Integration Components On CentOS 5

Introduction

Microsoft has introduced together with Windows 2008 a new Hypervisor called Hyper-V. Initially Microsoft only supported Microsoft products and Novell Suse, but recently they added support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With this support it is also possible to install the components on CentOS.

1. Download Latest Linux Integration Components

You can download the exe file here. Extract it and copy the linuxic.iso somewhere you can mount it as a cdrom on your Virtual Machine.

2. Installation

To install the drivers we need the development tools. Easiest method to install those is via Yum.

yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

Next we will copy the contents of the cdrom to the server

mkdir -p /mnt/cdrom
mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
cp -rp /mnt/cdrom /opt/linux_ic
umount /mnt/cdrom

Let's create a new initrd image with the nessecary drivers.

cd /opt/linux_ic
./setup.pl drivers

When this is finished you can safely shutdown the virtual machine and add the synthetic adapters (Network, SCSI, ...). Once the machine is booted and logged in in you can verify the installation of the drivers with following command:

lsmod | grp vsc

netvsc                 73704  0
storvsc                66824  0
blkvsc                 70440  3
vmbus                  86120  3 netvsc,storvsc,blkvsc
scsi_mod              196569  6 scsi_dh,sg,storvsc,blkvsc,libata,sd_mod

If you installed a synthetic Network Adapter you can verify with ifconfig -a and check if there is seth0.