Microsoft has released version 3.1 of the Linux Integration Services for its hypervisor Hyper-V, providing support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.0 and 6.1 and CentOS 6.0, for which support was announced in May this year, in both 32- and 64-bit versions up to 4 vCPUs. Microsoft now also provides the Integration Services in Red Hat Package Manager format (RPM)
The other supported distributions RHEL 5and Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 are still supported with the 2.1 version of the integration services, which were released in July last year. This version doesn’t provide support yet for Ubuntu and Debian distributions, which Microsoft announced in June this year.
This version provides the following new features:
- Support for the the network controller and the IDE and SCSI storage controllers that were developed specifically for Hyper-V.
- Boot devices now take advantage of the block Virtualization Service Client (VSC) to provide enhanced performance, providing Fastpath Boot Support for Hyper-V
- Timesync, providing synchonization of the clock inside the virtual machine with the clock on the virtualization server with the help of the pluggable time source device.
- Virtual machines running Linux can be shut down from either Hyper-V Manager or System Center Virtual Machine Manager by using the “Shut Down” command.
- Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) Support: Supported Linux distributions can use up to 4 virtual processors (VP) per virtual machine. Not available for 32-bit Linux guest OS running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008.
- Heartbeat support which allows the virtualization server to detect whether the virtual machine is running and responsive.
- KVP (Key Value Pair) Exchange support, which provides information about the running Linux virtual machine and can be obtained by using the Key Value Pair exchange functionality on the Windows Server 2008 virtualization server.
The integration services still doesn’t provide support for Volume Snapshot Backup, Jumbo Frames and TCP Offload, and Hot Add/Remove of VHD’s and Passthrough disks.