In June Microsoft finally released its long awaited hypervisor: Hyper-V 1.0.
The first release of this bare-metal VMM supports one flavor of Linux as guest OS: Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux 10. But to work properly inside the virtual machine Linux needs additional components that Microsoft releases under the name of Linux Integration Components.
This package includes the Linux implementation of the Hyper-V VMBus (the same high performance interface that Windows 2003/2008 guest OSes use), the pass-through drivers for network and storage, and some other things.
Microsoft developed this software separately from Hyper-V and while the latter is already available, the Linux Integration Components are not.
They were expected last month but the company postponed its release without adding details.