Controller card support in Hyper-V?

[MrCrispy]

This is quite possibly a stupid question. I need extra ports for my server and am looking at this card :-

Supermicro UIO MegaRAID AOC-USAS2-L8i
http://www.provantage.com/supermicro-aoc-usas2-l8i~7SUP91NP.htm

This is not supported in all Linux distro's, but it is in Windows. Can Hyper-V virtualize it so Linux in a VM can use the card?

If not I will have to consider the older AOC-SASLP-MV8 or LSI SAS1068E based card. The newer versions do SATA2 so seem more future proof and price difference is only $10-20.

 

[Metaluna]

As long as there's a driver for Windows Server 2008 R2 (and I believe there is), the card should do what you want. No matter what card you use, Hyper-V always presents the same virtualized controller interface(s) to the guest OS. The guest needs to have special drivers installed that can take advantage of these interfaces and get good performance. For Linux this is called the Linux Integration Components (IC), and you will probably need to compile it in yourself (recent versions of Ubuntu have it built-in, but not the latest version AFAIK). Unfortunately I have not had good luck with the Linux IC on Ubuntu, but I have not tried the latest releases from MS. Performance is good, but I've had stability issues, so I've gone back to using the legacy drivers. Not sure if the problem is with the network driver, disk I/O, or something else.

Also, if you're using the free version of Hyper-V 2008 R2, it probably won't have the driver for the USAS2-L8i built in. Since there's no GUI in that release, you will need to install the driver manually at the command line. Not a big deal but you'll need to Google around for the right command-line procedure to do it.

 

[J-Will]

the VM will not see the RAID array by default. the guest will just be given a generic hard drive to use which you designate the size. So as long as the controller will work on the host OS (server 2008) it will work.

Only certain versions of linux are officially supported, though most will work 'unofficially'.