MS Hyper-V

Running linux on Windows 2012

[dstiles]

I am about to rent a windows 2012 server to run my web sites from (upgrade from 2003 server). I have been told about hyper-V and am looking through a mound of documentation but in the end it's going to be "do it and see what happens".

Originally I was going to run a linux (preferably Mint) VPS for a postscript/dovecot mail server. Now it looks likely I will try Hyper-V for the same system.

Does anyone have experience of installing linux on Hyper-V and can offer advice or warnings?

(posted here because, after all, it is an MS operating system :) ...)

[Ocean10000]

I have setup and run a linux desktop install under Windows Hyper V. I didn't have any major problems, other then me being very rusty with my Linux skill and having fat fingers. Just make sure you use a relatively recent distribution, MS has contributed work to the kernel and other places to make sure Linux works better under Hyper v.

[dstiles]

Thanks. I'll bear that in mind.

I have a small notion to use ubuntu 13.04 instead of mint, which is based on ubuntu 12.04. There is information that 13.04 runs hyper-v better but that 12.04 can be suitably updated. I'll have to find out. :(

[dstiles]

I have to say MS doesn't make life as easy as it used to. I had only minor problems updating from 2000 to 2003 but this 2012 is a pig! I've been working on it two to four hours a day for about a fortnight now and it still isn't working. :(

Trying to install MySQL was (and still is) the first hurdle. I shifted all my old MDB databases to MySQL in order to reduce the upgrade problems; I needn't have bothered, it seems.

Main problem is ODBC, which consistently returns error 193 (wrong 32/64 bit version) even after repeated removals/reinstallations. I've even tried importing a set of connections from the 2003 server, after modifying relevant bits such as 5.1 to 5.2 etc. Several online complaints about this but no "this'll definitely fix it" solutions. Even the MySQL forums haven't come up with a solution that everyone agrees on and at least one bug thread is still open on it.

It didn't help when I found the Registry pointed to system32 for the 64bit driver and sysWOW64 for the 32bit one. Which is apparently correct: 32 bit drivers are in sysWOW64 and vice versa. Now that's intuitive! I can see where the WOW comes in. :(

A secondary problem is trying to prevent port 3306 from being published online: the firewall doesn't stop it and if I turn off TCP/IP connection in MySQL itself I no longer get access to the database from the WorkBench (and probably not from ODBC when/if I ever get it going!).

Adding a couple of web sites (sans MySQL content) wasn't too bad but I will have to set up all sites from scratch as I can't find an upgrade tool to reliably (or at all) upgrade from the 2003 IIS. This is not just site directories but several virtuals per site as well. But then, MS never did have a proper upgrade path for... well, anything, really.

And then the easy bit. I installed Mint in hyper-v in a few minutes. Easy! That was three days ago: I'm still trying to get online through hyper-switches. No one, as far as I can find, notes what the linux connection values should be (IP, mask etc). :(

I really, really wish I'd never begun building sites in ASP all those years ago. :(