RedHat Enterprise Linux VM on Hyper-V with Enhanced Session Mode

• RHEL 8
• RHEL 9
• Rocky 8
• Rocky 9
• Fedora 40

Activate Virtualization in BIOS

The first step to use Hyper-V on your computer is to activate Virtualization in the BIOS.

• On Intel platform, option name is Intel VT-x
• On AMD platform, option name is AMD-V

For another platform or if you are facing any troubles, please refer to your computer documentation.

Activate Hyper-V on Windows 10

To be able to use Hyper-V on Windows 10, you first need to enable it. To do that, run the following command in Powershell as Administrator.

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Hyper-V -All

/!\ By enabling Hyper-V you may have difficulties with another Hypervisor Software as VirtualBox or VMWare.

You can restart your computer to apply the new configuration.

Add user to Hyper-V Administrators group

Adding a user to Hyper-V Administrators group is easy and useful. You will be able to create / manage / delete / start / stop VMs without asking Administrators permission.

First, you need to know your Username in Windows. To do that, you can run Powershell as user. Then type the following command and your Username will be prompted.

echo $env:Username

Once you know your Username, you need to run Powershell but as Administrator and type de following command by replacing <USERNAME> with your Username. This will add the user to Hyper-V Administrators group.

For Windows 11 :

net localgroup "Hyper-V Administrators" "<USERNAME>" /add

For previous version of Windows :

net localgroup "Hyper-V Administrators" "<USERNAME>"

You can restart your computer to apply the new configuration.

Create VM

A dedicated guide provided by RedHat already exists. Just follow the instructions given by this guide.

The guide is valid for RHEL based distributions and not only RHEL8.

RedHat guide : RHEL Hyper-V Quick Install

Please pay attention to Before you begin section, point 1 if you want a no-cost Red Hat Developer subscription and the RHEL Binary DVD .iso file.

To have free RedHat developper subscription RedHat no-cost subscription

RHEL images are available for download on RedHat Developers Website Rocky Linux images are available for download on Rocky Linux Website Fedora images are available for download on Fedora Website

You may install Rocky Linux 8, Rocky Linux 9 or Fedora instead of RHEL 8 or RHEL 9. In this case, you can follow the same guide and ignore subscription parts.

Hyper-V Enhanced Session Mode

Enhanced Session Mode allows:

• Better graphical experience (Fluidity and resolution).
• Clipboard support.
• Drives sharing.
• Smart card support.
• Audio support.

To enable Enhanced Session Mode, you need to install and configure hyperv-tools and xrdp on the VM.

To do that, you can run the dedicated script provided in the current repository. This script is only for RHEL based distributions.

git clone https://github.com/EtienneBarbier/Hyper-V-RHEL-VM.git
cd Hyper-V-RHEL-VM
chmod +x install_configure_esm_rhel.sh
sudo ./install_configure_esm_rhel.sh

Once this script has been executed, you can shut down the VM.

In Hyper-V you need to enable the Guest services for your VM. You can find the option under : Click right on VM > settings > Management > Integrations Services > Guest services.

The last step is to set the EnhancedSessionTransportType to HVSocket for your VM. This can be done by executing the following command line as user in Powershell by replacing <VM_NAME> by the name of your VM.

Set-VM "<VM_NAME>" -EnhancedSessionTransportType HVSocket

Now, you can start your VM. After a few moments, you should have the following windows prompted.

You can set your display settings and go to Local Resources to modify sound and clipboard settings.

Under more, you have access to Drives and Smart Cards.

You are done with the settings and you can connect to your VM. Note that is not possible to connect with a user already connected in another session.

Sources

Linux VM Tools from Microsoft on Github

Enhanced Session Mode from Secana on Github

XRPD Pipewire module on Github

Audio (Only for RHEL 8)

Audio is not working by default for RHEL 8. To be able to have VM audio on the host computer, you need to install xrdp module for pulseaudio.

Prerequisites

Allow 2G of disk space for the mock root in /var/lib/mock.

It is assumed that you will be building and installing the package using an existing user account with sudo privileges.

Use these commands to install the mock package, and add the current user to the mock group:

sudo dnf install mock autoconf automake
sudo usermod -a -G mock $USER

Log out and log in again as the current user, and use the id -Gn command to check you are on the mock group

Prepare & build pulseaudio

mkdir xrdp-tmp
cd xrdp-tmp
dnf download --source pulseaudio sbc libatomic_ops webrtc-audio-processing
mock --chain ./sbc-*.src.rpm ./libatomic_ops-*.src.rpm ./webrtc-audio-processing-*.src.rpm ./pulseaudio-*.src.rpm

The last command can take a while to execute.

The build is made in a sub-directory of /var/lib/mock. This can be fairly deep, so is best located with a find command:

find /var/lib/mock -type d -name pulseaudio-\* 2>/dev/null
/var/lib/mock/epel-8-x86_64/root/builddir/build/BUILD/pulseaudio-14.0

Assign this directory to the environment variable PULSE_DIR. On your system, this value may well be different:

PULSE_DIR=/var/lib/mock/epel-8-x86_64/root/builddir/build/BUILD/pulseaudio-14.0

Build the xrdp module

Finally, let's build xrdp source / sink modules. You'll have two .so files module-xrdp-sink.so and module-xrdp-source.so.

sudo dnf install make libtool libtool-ltdl-devel pulseaudio-libs-devel git
git clone https://github.com/neutrinolabs/pulseaudio-module-xrdp.git
cd pulseaudio-module-xrdp
./bootstrap && ./configure PULSE_DIR=$PULSE_DIR
make

Install the xrdp module

The last step to install xrdp module is to install module files at the right location. In the same pulseaudio-module-xrdp directory from the previous step:

sudo make install

To load xrdp module, you need to add instructions in Pulseaudio configuration file. The following command line will append new instructions at the end of the configuration file.

sudo tee -a /etc/pulse/default.pa << END
### XRDP modules
.ifexists module-xrdp-sink.so
load-module module-xrdp-sink.so
.endif
.ifexists module-xrdp-source.so
load-module module-xrdp-source.so
.endif
END

Due to a Pulseaudio issue and in order to have the right configuration, you need to mask pulseaudio service. Pulseaudo will be started at session startup anyway.

The following command line needs to be executed as user.

systemctl --user mask pulseaudio.service

To apply the new configuration, you can restart the VM or run the following command:

pulseaudio -k

Cleaning up

You can clean up the build machine completely if required:

1. Use mock --clean to remove the mock chroot
2. Delete the xrdp-tmp directory
3. Remove the user from the mock group. sudo gpasswd -d $USER mock
4. Remove the mock RPM. sudo dnf remove -y mock

Sources

Official sources / documentation

Official Centos 8 build documentation

Pulseaudio issue

Reset Enhanced Session Mode Settings

If you want to change Session settings and dedicated windows are not prompted at startup, you can right-click on VM and select Edit Session Settings.