Supported CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machines on Hyper-V

Applies To: Hyper-V Server 2012, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft Hyper-V Server Technical Preview, Windows Server 2012, Hyper-V Server 2012 R2, Windows 10 Technical Preview, Windows Server Technical Preview, Windows 8

The following feature distribution maps indicate the features that are present in built-in and downloadable versions of Linux Integration Services. The known issues and workarounds for each distribution are listed after the tables.

Red Hat certifies Red Hat Enterprise Linux as supported when running on Hyper-V. See the Red Hat Hardware Certification web page for details on the certified combinations of RHEL versions and Hyper-V versions.

Because of potential conflicts between the built-in LIS support and the downloadable LIS support when you upgrade the kernel, we recommend you disable automatic updates, uninstall the LIS downloadable packages, update the kernel, and then install the latest LIS release.

Table legend

• Built in – LIS are included as part of this Linux distribution. The kernel module version numbers for the built in LIS (as shown by lsmod, for example) are different from the version number on the Microsoft-provided LIS download package. A mismatch does not indicate that the built in LIS is out of date.

• √ - Feature available

• (blank) - Feature not available

In this section:

• RHEL/CentOS 5.x Series

• RHEL/CentOS 6.x Series

• RHEL/CentOS 7.x Series

• Notes

RHEL/CentOS 5.x Series

This series has a supported 32-bit PAE kernel available. LIS 3.5 is not compatible with RHEL/CentOS 5.9-5.11. There is no built-in LIS support for RHEL/CentOS before 5.9.

RHEL/CentOS 6.x Series

The 32-bit kernel for this series is PAE enabled. There is no built-in LIS support for RHEL/CentOS 6.0-6.3.

RHEL/CentOS 7.x Series

This series only has 64-bit kernels.

Notes

1. For this RHEL/CentOS release, VLAN tagging works but VLAN trunking does not.

2. Static IP injection may not work if Network Manager has been configured for a given synthetic network adapter on the virtual machine. To ensure smooth functioning of static IP injection please ensure that either Network Manager is either turned off completely or has been turned off for a specific network adapter through its ifcfg-ethX file.

3. While using virtual fibre channel devices, ensure that logical unit number 0 (LUN 0) has been populated. If LUN 0 has not been populated, a Linux virtual machine might not be able to mount fibre channel devices natively.

4. If there are open file handles during a live virtual machine backup operation, then in some corner cases, the backed-up VHDs might have to undergo a file system consistency check (fsck) on restore.

5. Live backup operations can fail silently if the virtual machine has an attached iSCSI device or direct-attached storage (also known as a pass-through disk).

6. Live backup support for RHEL/CentOS 5.9 – 5.11/6.4/6.5 is available through Hyper-V Backup Essentials for Linux.

7. Dynamic memory support is only available on 64-bit virtual machines.

8. Hot-Add support is not enabled by default in this distribution. To enable Hot-Add support you need to add a udev rule under /etc/udev/rules.d/ as follows:

   1. Create a file /etc/udev/rules.d/100-balloon.rules. You may use any other desired name for the file.

   2. Add the following content to the file: SUBSYSTEM=="memory", ACTION=="add", ATTR{state}="online"

   3. Reboot the system to enable Hot-Add support.

9. Dynamic memory operations can fail if the guest operating system is running too low on memory. The following are some best practices:

   • Startup memory and minimal memory should be equal to or greater than the amount of memory that the distribution vendor recommends.

   • Applications that tend to consume the entire available memory on a system are limited to consuming up to 80 percent of available RAM.

10. If you are using Dynamic Memory on a Windows Server 2012 operating system, specify Startup memory, Minimum memory, and Maximum memory parameters in multiples of 128 megabytes (MB). Failure to do so can lead to hot-add failures, and you may not see any memory increase in a guest operating system.

11. Certain distributions, including those using LIS 3.5 and 4.0, only provide Ballooning support and do not provide Hot-Add support. In such a scenario, the dynamic memory feature can be used by setting the Startup memory parameter to a value which is equal to the Maximum memory parameter. This results in all the requisite memory being Hot-Added to the virtual machine at boot time and then later depending upon the memory requirements of the host, Hyper-V can freely allocate or deallocate memory from the guest using Ballooning. Please ensure that Startup Memory and Minimum Memory are not set below the recommended value for the distribution.

12. To enable key/value pair (KVP) infrastructure, install the hypervkvpd or hyperv-daemons (on RHEL 6.6) rpm package from your RHEL ISO. Alternatively the package can be installed directly from RHEL repositories.

13. In Windows Server 2012 R2, the key/value pair (KVP) infrastructure might not function correctly without a Linux software update. Contact your distribution vendor to obtain the software update in case you see problems with this feature.

14. Generation 2 virtual machines have secure boot enabled by default and Generation 2 Linux virtual machines will not boot unless the secure boot option is disabled. You can disable secure boot in the Firmware section of the settings for the virtual machine in Hyper-V Manager or you can disable it using Powershell:

    Set-VMFirmware –VMName "VMname" -EnableSecureBoot Off
    

See Also

• Set-VMFirmware

• Supported Debian virtual machines on Hyper-V

• Supported Oracle Linux virtual machines on Hyper-V

• Supported SUSE virtual machines on Hyper-V

• Supported Ubuntu virtual machines on Hyper-V

• Supported FreeBSD virtual machines on Hyper-V

• Feature Descriptions for Linux and FreeBSD virtual machines on Hyper-V

• Red Hat Hardware Certification