Running trixbox on Hyper-V 2008 R2

Previously, I’ve never had much success running trixbox within a virtual environment, but I decided to revisit the possibility with the recent release of Windows Server 2008 R2 and the latest version of trixbox (currently 2.8) and this time had much greater success.

The only thing I had to do was install the Microsoft Hyper-V Integration Components for Linux on the machine and set the kernel parameters appropriately (as described below).

You can download the .iso from Microsoft at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=ab7f4983-93c5-4a70-8c79-0642f0d59ec2.

Currently, CentOS/RedHat doesn’t appear to be supported by Microsoft, but following the steps below will allow you to install the appropriate drivers (and confirm a successful intallation): –

• Mount the downloaded .iso on your trixbox machine
• Install the kernel-devel and gcc (GNU Compiler Collection) packages by running the commands below

yum install kernel-devel

yum install gcc

•  Now you’ll need to mount the CD ROM using these commands

mkdir -p /mnt/cdrom

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom

• Copy the contents of the CD to the local machine

cp -rp /mnt/cdrom /opt/linux_ic

• Unmount the CD ROM

umount /mnt/cdrom

• Run the driver setup

cd /opt/linux_ic

./setup.pl drivers

• Set the kernel boot parameters as per this article
• You’ll need to restart to initialise the drivers

shutdown -r now

• When the machine is back up and running, make sure the drivers are loaded by running the command below

lsmod | grep vsc

• This should give you a result similar to the following

netvsc

storvsc

blkvsc

vmbus

scsi_mod

Now you have the integration components installed, configure the rest of the options on your trixbox and test it out. I allocated mine 512MB RAM, and it doesn’t skip a beat while I performed audio streaming tests.