Fedora 14 Under Hyper-V R2
Saturday 15th January, 2011 10:38 Comments: 0
When Fedora 14 came out last year I thought about running it as a virtual machine on a relatively new Hyper-V box at work that has some free resources, rather than on an old server that is no longer under warranty. At first I tried the normal network adapter in the hope that Microsoft's Integration Components would install on Fedora give that they officially support Red Hat. The drivers don't compile/install on Fedora 14 so I gave up and decided to try the legacy network adapter, which might put more strain on the host, but should at least work fine on the guest OS. It didn't. After configuring the static IP, I couldn't ping anything, not even the router (that's setup to only respond to ICMP requests on the local subnet). As I wasn't getting any credit for doing this, I gave up and installed it on an old server.
But I have good news! I stumbled across this suggestion of disabling the irqbalance service when using the legacy network adapter under Hyper-V and I gave it a try last night (which was slightly complicated by the fact Hyper-V doesn't capture mouse input when using Remote Desktop without the Integration Components, as I had to gain access to the KVM over IP to have local console access in order to move the mouse and do a few convenient clicks). I disabled the irqbalance service with a quick chkconfig irqbalance off and everything started working. I gave the box a reboot for good measure, logged out of everything, and was glad to see that I could access the Fedora 14 guest using SSH. I then installed denyhosts for good measure, along with some other packages that are typically required. Hopefully we can migrate to the virtual machine if we don't see any major issues, which will free up the existing physical server and hopefully regain around 10 minutes battery backup on the UPS, bringing us back over an hour.
I do wonder why the Hyper-V guest can't cope with the irqbalance service. It sounds like a Microsoft problem, but I could be wrong. It'd be nice if the integration components worked, as that might solve some of the problems, but I accept that Microsoft only officially support a couple of distros and Fedora isn't one of them.
But I have good news! I stumbled across this suggestion of disabling the irqbalance service when using the legacy network adapter under Hyper-V and I gave it a try last night (which was slightly complicated by the fact Hyper-V doesn't capture mouse input when using Remote Desktop without the Integration Components, as I had to gain access to the KVM over IP to have local console access in order to move the mouse and do a few convenient clicks). I disabled the irqbalance service with a quick chkconfig irqbalance off and everything started working. I gave the box a reboot for good measure, logged out of everything, and was glad to see that I could access the Fedora 14 guest using SSH. I then installed denyhosts for good measure, along with some other packages that are typically required. Hopefully we can migrate to the virtual machine if we don't see any major issues, which will free up the existing physical server and hopefully regain around 10 minutes battery backup on the UPS, bringing us back over an hour.
I do wonder why the Hyper-V guest can't cope with the irqbalance service. It sounds like a Microsoft problem, but I could be wrong. It'd be nice if the integration components worked, as that might solve some of the problems, but I accept that Microsoft only officially support a couple of distros and Fedora isn't one of them.