Mounting CD and DVD in SuSE in Hyper-V with the Linux Integration Components Installed

SuSE Enterprise 10 SP2 works great on Hyper V, the performance (especially once you get the VMBus drivers installed) is near-iron, and the integration between SuSE and AD is great. It's the perfect setup for running a few Linux servers in a mostly Windows shop.

The only problem that I had getting the CD/DVD drive to mount. Once you get the VMBus drivers working properly, when you boot with the XEN kernal the CD Rom drive will show up as a Hard Disk to Linux. This will prevent SUSE from automatically mounting the CD/DVD drive when you swap out the discs (or upon boot). The solution is to mount the CD/DVD rom manually; to do that, do the following:

1. Open up Terminal
2. Make a directory as a mount point for the drive ( "mkdir /media/cdrom0" )
3. Mount the drive by typing in: "mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdc /media/cdrom0"

This is assuming that the DVD drive for the Virtual Host is on IDE Controller 1 location 0. If it is on another channel, you'll have to change the /dev/hdc line of the mount command to the correct value:

• IDE Controller 0, Location 0: /dev/hda
• IDE Controller 0, Location 1: /dev/hdb
• IDE Controller 1, Location 0: /dev/hdc
• IDE Controller 1, Location 1: /dev/hdc

Update: Found one more issue. When using YaST2 to configure the network interface, make sure that you use the "Traditional Method with ifup" and not "User Controlled with Network Manager". Otherwise it will continually fail to setup the network adapter without providing any relevant error messages.

HP Proliant Support Pack on Server 2008: Server Core

We had some problems early on with the initial version of HP's PSP on our HP DL380 G5s and Server Core. The problems seem to have been resolved in the latest (8.15) version of the PSP. To install it, simply extract the PSP to a directory and run the setup.exe from the command line in Server Core. You'll get the standard HP GUI to guide you through the installation (or you can use setupc.exe for the commandline driven installation). The only "note" is that you'll have to install the SNMP service before hand by using the command "start /w ocsetup SNMP-SC".