At the end of January Microsoft silently updated its Linux Integrated Components package to version 2.0, introducing the long awaited support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) guest operating systems in Hyper-V.
Microsoft announced future support for Red Hat operating systems in July 2009, since the open source vendor joined the Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP).
Customers had to wait no less than seven months to finally have a version of Hyper-V Linux Integrated Components that supports RHEL 5 (including 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4 versions, both 32 and 64bit).
Like for Novell SUSE Linux, Microsoft doesn’t include in the package the optimized drivers for mouse. To have those customers need to rely on Citrix, which is offering them as open source through the Project Satori.
On top of that Linux Integrated Components still only supports Linux virtual machines with a single virtual CPU.
In July 2009 Microsoft also released the package as open source, and despite the drama behind that launch, the move should guarantee that every major Linux distribution will be included over time.
Let’s just hope that the process will not take seven months for every distribution out there.
Thanks to HyperVoria for the news.