thefrozencoder

Programming and Technology blog

The Hyper-V n00b - Child Partition - OpenBSD 4.4

So far I have really zero issues with installing Windows based OS's (once each one had the latest service pack) as child partition, what about unsupported OS's.  I figured that I would need to install a familiar OS that I have lots of experience with and I would like to work with it some more, especially from the firewall side of things again.  Of course my choice was crystal clear; OpenBSD.  Now I wondered just how well the "virtual hardware" would work, I have installed OpenBSD in Virtual PC which worked pretty well so what do I have to loose?

Since you can mount an ISO to your CD/DVD drive when creating a new virtual machine I downloaded the install44.iso for OpenBSD and selected it and started the VM.  From what I can see the only thing that wasn't supported was the Microsoft VGA adapter.  But since it probably supports the VGA standard it still worked.  So after about 5 minutes of installing and configuring I rejoiced to see the following screen.

Now of course I will need to run further tests but it shows promise.  Adding another NIC and the possibility of having this as my firewall to the internet has some pretty strong advantages.  I only hope that I still have my old config files kicking around for my last firewall but I am sure that I will manage.

Of course things like the shutdown actions in the toolbar do not work and since there are no Integration Services there is no Heartbeat monitor but hey, it's working none the less.  I also noticed that the time was 4 hours out which I am not sure about.  Maybe OpenBSD cannot read the timing from the virtual BIOS or whatever it used/called.  I will have to investigate that one.  Otherwise I can enable the OpenNTPD dameon just to make sure that the time is always in synch.