Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft To Support CentOS Linux In Hyper-V
jbrodkin writes "Long the enemy of Linux users, Microsoft is apparently seeing dollar signs in the Linux-dominated Web server market. Microsoft's virtualization software, Hyper-V, will immediately add support for CentOS Linux, a community version of Red Hat that even Microsoft notes is a 'popular Linux distribution for hosters.' 'This enables our Hosting partners to consolidate their mixed Windows + Linux infrastructure on Windows Server Hyper-V,' Microsoft said. In addition to Web hosting, this targets another area where Microsoft is stuck in second place: the virtualization market dominated by VMware."
Yes, I believe there are almost as many hyper-V servers as zune music players.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
I would think Hyper-V is behind VMWare, KVM, Xen, z/VM, and a few other hypervisers. Has Microsoft really been able to gain that much market share?
Palm trees and 8
Microsoft doesn't care about linux, it cares about market domination while making money. This is one more way to add to their ability to dominate and make money. If they're still selling licenses and getting systems installed, caring about what you implement means little. True, it's only one OS at this point(presumably), but I imagine they'll add more as time comes. This is also about competition from IBM, with which these same points apply
Running Linux in a VM on Windows is like strapping yourself to the outside of a car with a seatbelt.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Microsoft is good about not letting feelings get in the way of business. They famously ignored the Internet for a long time and then caught up fast. They saw the threat of Netbooks immediately. They might not always get things right, but they keep on trying.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"not trolling"
"Reboot host and have to shutdown all your VMs at least once a month?!!"
Not trolling you say? What's the last version of Windows you used? 98?
While it's not nearly as widely used as VMware or other virtualization platforms, your argument is weak. Windows 2008 R2 hardly needs a reboot.
The facts are Hyper-V is behind in features and performance than others. For example, only since 2008 R2 SP1 a few months ago do they support shared memory. Before that, if you had 10 hosts and wanted to grant each 4 GB of RAM, you needed 40 GB in your host. If you didn't have enough RAM, you couldn't boot up your guests - lack of memory. That's a serious drawback, especially since the host OS can consume memory at will. There have been times that I've shutdown a Hyper-V guest and I couldn't boot it back up because the host had done something to use a few more MB's of RAM than before.
So all the stability and security of Microsoft running on the bare metal; combined with the user-friendliness and ease of use of Linux. :)
Well that is the answer to his question. Windows is actually quite stable now, on par with Linux. Especially if you set it up correctly so the Hyper-V system is the only thing running on the Master and use the other Virtual OS's as the systems that can bomb.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
KVM and Xen are both fully featured enterprise class hypervisors with the ability to live migrate. Hyper-V only *just* got live migration and only when you're using clustering (translation: large wads of cash are required). VMWare is undoubtedly the leader, but KVM and Xen are defaintely fighting for 2nd.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
You don't need to patch IE, you don't need to patch Office, you don't really need to patch very much at all if all you're running is the virtualization software (which one would be doing if uptime of the guests is important).
User are leaving Centos left and right, security patches are months behind schedule, Centos 6 is over 6 months behind RH enterprise 6, the devs are a closed group and will not accept help, and do there best to allienate the user base.
Well that is the answer to his question. Windows is actually quite stable now, on par with Linux.
Well, believe what you wish, I suppose. Over this last weekend, I set up my wife's laptop with Windows 7/64. The number of reboots I had to go through after the O/S install in order to get everything updated was no less than 10 or so, over a few hours. Mind you, this wasn't when setting up drivers, this was *after* I'd loaded the O/S and the drivers. This was just to apply security updates.
I have quite a number of Linux/RedHat/CentOS servers that I maintain, and when I build a new server, I have to reboot exactly one time after loading the O/S to apply updates. Literally, I type a single line as:
yum -y update && shutdown -r now;
That's it. That's the entire sum of the update process, after which I have a fully working, fully updated server with all updates updated.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
My new home computer runs Windows 7 quite well, it hasn't blue screened or locked up once since I bought it a year ago. My coworker's Window's box locks up at least once a week. Just because Windows runs fine on your computer does not mean it will run well on everyone's.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
OpenVZ (Virtuozzo) and Linux-VServer used to be the big names in virtualization. Now Linux has LXC in the mainline kernel. Virtualization with Xen and KVM are nice. But when you want to run Linux in virtualized guests you get a much better performance with para virtualization.
Xen and KVM are useful is you want to run Windows as a guest. But for Linux guests I really recommend the above.
But why would you buy a commercial Hyper-V? VMware is there. VirtualBox has excellent support for Windows hosts and is free. I don't see how Microsoft could make any headway with all the excellent products with every ninche (commercial, open source, free, expensive) already taken.
Can you describe one of these magical hardware configurations where a Windows VM host can run, but Linux can't?
Honestly I cannot understand why you would virtualize anything but commercial software. It is a pain to manage without virtualization, it suffers from legacy problems due to all of the very big risks you take when you buy the license. You really have no benefits at all I can think of running commercial software.
Thanks to KVM, the commercial software I do have to buy, I can virtualize it, freeze the hardware requirements in time so it will always work forever and ever. Never need to reinstall it and it isn't if, but when the company goes tits up I am protected. I can dump the software on my terms.
I can even make a copy of it in case the hardware virtualizing the commercial software breaks.
Deploy it to a disaster recovery site and I don't have to have a huge checklist to go through to make sure it is configured right during recovery.
No stupid specific backup agents for commercial software's little proprietary databases they all like to create to make things even more expensive to use.
I left with the opinion that Hyper-V is a solution in search of a problem.
I would be using Cent OS with KVM to virtualize Microsoft's OS, where it is safely under the flipper of my penguin, where it can't make my life hell.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
If Hyper-V is the only thing running on Windows, just so you can run Linux, why would you run Windows in the first place? Just run XEN, KVM or even VirtualBox on Linux and have several Linux sessions run on that.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Shouldn't we be hosting Windows on CentOS instead of the other way around? I mean, usually you go with Linux for robustness or price, and you host Windows because of a requirement (IIS, Exchange, politics) that can't easily be met natively on Linux. Hosting an operating system with uptimes measured in hundreds of days on an OS that has to be rebooted every 45 days doesn't seem wise to me.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
After banging my head against the Hyper-V headache for two days
I use hyper-v for testing my apps on multiple OS versions. It takes me less than 1 minute to configure a VM. This excludes any time spent copying VHDs across the network, if any. You took 2 days and you still haven't figured it out?
Do you ever accuse Microsoft of FUDing? Will you excuse me for pointing out the irony?
Understands this is not a concession or olive branch.
It is a way to damage the RedHat business model. Trust me - Redmond will get to the point they offer Premiere support for CentOS on HyperV, starving RedHat of oxygen.
Even if it made them no money at all, Redmond has people who'd love this outcome, and set MBOs for this.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Guess what? My esx hosts need updating and rebooting too. There's hot migration for that. Migrate VMs. Reboot host. Repeat.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
BitLocker has four ways to recover the key:
1: It offers to save both a printed copy of the key and a key file.
2: It can save it in Active Directory.
3: It can use the Data Recovery Agent specified in a policy.
4: You can specify what 128 or 256 key pleases you. All zeroes? Step right up.
I really wish some other OS had the ability to use the TPM for hard disk encryption functionality. TrouSerS tries, but we need an actual initiative for other operating systems. It wouldn't be that hard to accomplish -- boot into a RAMdisk, pass checks to the TPM along the way, if the TPM wouldn't cough up the key to mount "/" and other filesystems, prompt the user for a keyfile or a passphrase.
If you're using Hyper-V in Production for business you pretty much need datacenter edition. 4 VMs per box is ridiculous - it doesn't even begin to pay off and Enterprise doesn't have the features you need. That means $3K per processor or $6K per 2 socket box, and a fairly automatic upgrade to Software Assurance where you pay again every year. And you need two servers worth, plus the High Availability program to start being a comfortable environment you would trust to use in business - otherwise you're just aggregating all your failure mode in one box so that when something fails everything goes down at once and nobody sane wants that. You need two servers worth because you have to have someplace to migrate your virtual servers to when you're updating the firmware, the hardware or the OS. It's better to have three so you can stay redundant while updates occur. That way you can start thinking about "0 planned downtime" and a fourth of July barbecue where your iPhone doesn't blow up and drag you back to work.
People do use Hyper-V, and they're selling more of it lately than ever. But please, let's not call it free: Software Assurance and support puts the price of Hyper-V close to the cost of VMWare Enterprise Plus in the long run. Say it costs less than a Xen geek, or that it costs less than the overtime would for monthly patching on the weekend, and the ease of management and high-availability features are just bonus. Say that the Test/Dev servers then won't cost any extra server hardware, and people can more readily try new things. But it's not free.
And yes, Hyper-V can handle a lot more VMs than that. Oversubscribing CPU is one of the justifications for virtualization in the first place. Given proper back-end high-performance storage to keep them fed, and a decent amount of RAM, modern server processors are brutally overpowered for the tasks we give most of them.
There are a lot of talking points for Hyper-V, but please be honest with people: "free" is not one of them. People know it's not free. Saying it's free in some way shape or form is just attacking your own credibility. People don't need for it to be free. They need for it to be a good fit for their needs, and in many cases it is. Business people are realistic, and they don't have a lot of time. You may as well come right out and say that if you want to play the Hyper-V HA game then it costs $18K for the software licensing, plus more for the hardware and networking, just to sit at the table. Add a few thousand for 24/7 support and a few more thousand for a server geek to come get it running smoothly for you using best practice because you're just not going to wade in and get it right the first time.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I use Hyper-V at home . I was going to use ESXi (even bought a 'allowed' network card, and machine that was compatible), but after installing it I discovered that ESXi doesnt support dynamic disk images (ie you need to allocate the entire X Gb of space on physical disk), which makes simple backup tricky.
Switched over to Hyper-V (using my TechNet license), and its worked perfectly for several years. Ive not managed to crash it once, and it supports dynamic disks, AND dynamic memory (ie, you can tell it to always have 50% free ram in machine A and 25% in machine B), which is great.
Its also really nice to be able to RDP in for admin, rather than having to install special software on each client I may use. Of course I can also RDP in from my iPad / iPhone as well.
The only major feature that is missing from Hyper-V (for my home/geek use) is USB support / hardware passthrough, although my adventures with Xen trying to get that happening were fruitless...