Last night, after my son’s first birthday,  I checked my missed twitter messages and a retweet from Duncap Epping caught my eye. It was a link to an article from Eric Gray on vCritical about HA for Linux guests on Hyper-V. Now you will probably think, nice an HA for Linux on Hyper-V whitepaper/how-to, but this is not the case.

As you probably know, very little Linux distributions are supported on Hyper-V and therefore no integration tools are available. Because the lack of integration tools Microsoft Clustering Services, the service which provides HA services for Hyper-V, you can not gracefully shutdown an unsupported Linux host and when shutdown MSCS will desperately try to keep the guest up and running. Because of this shortcoming you will have to choose, run HA OR Linux because you can not run both.

A complete desciption can be found here in Eric Gray’s article on vCritical.com. If you are considering a Hyper-V implementation you should definitaly read this article.