FreeBSD on Server 2012 Hyper-V

This has been far more painful that I had expected.  And it seems that this experience was wrapped up in a few things.

Recently, there was an announcement of FreeBSD Integration Components being contributed to the world courtesy of Citrix, NetApp, and Microsoft.  http://freebsdonhyper-v.github.com/

Now, I thought I would give it a go.  So I downloaded the amd64 ISO image for FreeBSD 8.2 (the supported kernel for the Integration Components) and like a good person who hacks at things I downloaded the latest 9.0 release for good measure (just to try, you have to try after all).

Well, a good day went by – installing VMs, trying to get GIT installed, discovering that networking was not working properly, then name resolution was not working properly.  Sorting all that out….

Here is the low down of the experience so far:

Tip 1: Install FreeBSD into a VM using a Legacy Network Adapter. 

DHCP will properly work during installation (check ifconfig before you reboot, you want to know the IP you received).  Upon reboot, it all seems broken.  ifconfig shows no IP, major bummer.  A bit of searching will scratch up some random tidbits to get things working again.  Here is my summary to get past that:

Tip 2:  Before reboot write down your DHCP address (drop to a console if installing 8.2 and use ifconfig; 9.0 will show you in the GUI-ish network setup)

Tip 3:  After reboot, fix the DHCP assignment:

1. manually apply the IP that you wrote down using ifconfig: 
   1. ifconfig de0 192.168.3.5 netmask 255.255.255.0 (IP and netmask)
   2. ifconfig de0 down
   3. ifconfig de0 up
2. Now that you are on the network, release and renew to get DHCP to properly assign all the settings (if you didn’t ‘down’ and ‘up’, this won’t work).
   1. dhclient de0   (you should notice that it gets the IP from your DHCP server and applies it)

That was an immediate and temporary quick fix that I found through searching, however on reboot it means little to me as I have to manually do the workaround again.

Tip 4:  Modify so that DHCP will always work on boot

This is the one step that seems counter intuitive to me.  I thought I set DHCP to be enabled during the installation, why don’t I get an IP address?  I finally uncovered some clues through a few days of searching and learning and refining searches.  (it is amazing how the new still works like the old..)

Edit /etc/rc.conf:

Comment the following with a "#":  ifconfig_de0

Add the following:  ifconfig_de0="SYNCDHCP media 100baseTX mediaopt full-duplex"

This definitely needs more resiliency as we being to think about moving this VM about.  Additional searching shows this is tied to the DEC 100Mbps driver in FreeBSD (“de” device).  The edit forces the device to full-duplex.  Without this edit there is a duplex mismatch between the driver in the VM and the port of the vSwitch.  Interesting details..

Tip 5:  Fix the DNS settings so remote name resolution actually works (if it is not, as mine wasn’t / didn’t)

So, if you follow the instructions from github to install the Integration Components, step 2 is to install git.  Well, I tried and tried and DNS would not resolve.  Looking at /etc/resolv.conf I see my DNS servers, but nothing was resolving.

edit /etc/resolv.conf and add the word ‘search’ before your DNS servers name (which were auto inserted) – if it isn’t there. 

search brianeh.local

If that does not work add a public name server.  nameserver 199.7.83.42

I also had the problem where DNS requests that were forwarded were not coming back to the VM.  (I only had this problem after I set the hostname equal to the FQDN.  If I removed the domain from the hostname and only had a machine name then DNS forwarding worked properly.  So, it is obviously some strange FreeBSD thing that I don’t know enough about.  I did find a note that you can only have three, in the list.

You can find a list of public name servers here:  http://root-servers.org/

Tip 6:  Reboot after installing git. 

For some reason git is installed ( just by “pkg_add –r git” ) but the fetching of packages fails.  All that I can assume is that dependent services are not running.

Is that it?

Golly, I hope so.  I still could not get the Beta Hyper-V integration components to properly compile and run.  I built the kernel, did this and that.  I am sure it will come along, as there are other folks that will want to use a synthetic NIC (it was never detected).

I really hope this helps others and the project.