I'm planning to host a few Linux servers on commodity hardware (the one I can buy from newegg.com for less than $1,000). I had very bad experience regarding hardware support in Linux. I'm not sure whether the network adapter or chip-set driver is available in Linux or fully tested. I'm thinking of a work-around of running Linux as a guest OS on a Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (the Hypervisor itself is free). Hyper-V provides unified hardware for guest OS. Linux can fully utilize the host resources with Integration Component driver installed.
- How much overhead is it in running Linux on a hypervisor? Does someone run a benchmark against physical machine vs virtual machine?
- Is IC driver ready for production use?
Exécuter Linux on Hyper-V Server
Re: Exécuter Linux on Hyper-V Server
Hyper-V **does** support Linux as a guest OS, but being it a Microsoft platform, it's obviously more focused on Windows compatibility; here is the official list of supported guest OSes:
[http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794868(WS.10).aspx](http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794868(WS.10).aspx)
It could be worth noting that VMware ESXi is also free, and it has a much broader guest OS support (apart from being the market leader in virtualization and a generally much more mature product than Hyper-V).
Also, Hyper-V Server is somewhat painful to manage if you don't have System Center Virtual Machine Manager available: it has no GUI (the physical console can only be used for basic administration), the remote Hyper-V MMC only runs on Windows 7, and if you don't have an Active Directory domain around, things can get *tricky*. ESXi is much more user friendly, as long as you have at least one Windows PC (XP or later) where you can run the vSphere Client.
[http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794868(WS.10).aspx](http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794868(WS.10).aspx)
It could be worth noting that VMware ESXi is also free, and it has a much broader guest OS support (apart from being the market leader in virtualization and a generally much more mature product than Hyper-V).
Also, Hyper-V Server is somewhat painful to manage if you don't have System Center Virtual Machine Manager available: it has no GUI (the physical console can only be used for basic administration), the remote Hyper-V MMC only runs on Windows 7, and if you don't have an Active Directory domain around, things can get *tricky*. ESXi is much more user friendly, as long as you have at least one Windows PC (XP or later) where you can run the vSphere Client.