Available Today: FreeBSD Support for Windows Server Hyper-V

Posted by Anandeep Pannu
Senior Program Manager – Open Source Technical Center

Today, Microsoft and partners NetApp and Citrix are excited to announce the availability of FreeBSD support for Windows Server Hyper-V.  This collaboration, announced at BSDCAN 2012, will help more customers adopt virtualization and move toward cloud computing.  Microsoft is committed to supporting multiple platforms with its server virtualization solution so that more organizations can take advantage of server consolidation cost-savings and build foundations for private, public and hybrid cloud computing.  

It was invaluable to partner with NetApp and Citrix, who both have impressive expertise in how to enable FreeBSD to run on Hyper-V with high performance.  This release includes 8,500 lines of code submitted under the BSD license, supporting FreeBSD 8.2 on Windows Server 2008 R2.  We will continue to work with the community to support other releases of FreeBSD as well.  Analysis is currently underway to assess customer demand and partner capacity to extend support to FreeBSD 9.0 on Windows Server 2012.

The source code can be found on Github here, as well as instructions for building from source and running the drivers can be found here.  On behalf of the FreeBSD on Hyper-V team, we welcome your feedback through the mailing list to continue improving the code for future submission to the FreeBSD core.  

Check back on the blog tomorrow when we’ll have an interview with Citrix’s Thomas Goodwin, who led his team’s development efforts.  Tom will share his thoughts on how the project came together, as well as how it will support FreeBSD and Microsoft customers and partners.