Please be aware that the instructions differ significantly between AeroFS versions, due to AeroFS changing under the hood. Please be very careful that you check which version you are working with before following any instructions.

AeroFS 1.0.0-1.0.1

This was tested under AeroFS 1.0.1 and 1.0.0 and Hyper-V 2012 R2. It may not work for your environment. This is not a supported configuration. You're on your own.

  • Sign up for the private cloud edition, and download the OVA file from the AeroFS if you don't already have it.
  • Extract the vmdk from the OVA file using whatever tool you want. It's just a tar. 7-Zip, for example.
  • Using Virtualbox convert the vmdk to a vhd vboxmanage clonehd aerofs-appliance-1.0.1-disk1.vmdk --format VHD aerofs-disk_1.vhd. This is the simplest way to do it without System Center.
  • Create a Hyper-V VM and attach the VHD. I chose to add a legacy network card with a statically assigned mac address. This was out of habit as older versions of Linux didn't do well with randomly genereated mac addresses, and I didn't go delving as to whether or not non-legacy cards were supported within the appliance.
  • On first boot and first boot only we'll need to perform some magic as the default system runs irqbalance, which has some problems under Hyper-V, it seems.
  • Stop grub from auto booting, and edit the top entry by pressing e.
  • Add single to the end the kernel line. Press ctrl+x to boot. This boots us into single user mode.
  • Once booted, you will be logged in as root automatically. Edit /etc/default/irqbalance and disable it by setting enabled=0.
  • Reboot and configure the AeroFS appliance as indicated by the AeroFS documentation.

AeroFS 1.1.9

This was tested under AeroFS 1.1.19 and a Hyper-V 2012 R2 cluster. It may not work for your environment. This is not a supported configurion. You're on your own.

For 1.1.9 AeroFS handily provide a VHD download and say that they support Hyper-V. Unfortunately for me the networking just flat out refused to work out of the box.

  • If you have an existing AeroFS take a backup - you'll need this.
  • Download and apply the new VHD file.
  • Boot, and run through the on-screen text based setup - I needed to apply a static IP.
  • At this point the networking completely stopped working for me, if it works for you, then stop here.
  • Select reboot from the options menu.
  • On reboot you'll see a grub screen, very quickly press E to edit the default selected boot option.
  • Append init=/bin/bash after $linux_append.
  • Press F10 or ctrl+x to boot.
  • This'll drop you into a shell eventually.
  • If you ls /etc/systemd/network you should see 1 file, edit this and you'll probably see that under the match stanza that Name=. The lack of any interface name basically means that setting doesn't get applied at all. Change this to match your network interface name. If you're not sure what your interface naem is exit your editor and run /bin/ip addr. For me it was eth0.
  • Save and reboot and you'll find the box now pings correctly. Go ahead and restore your configuration and you're golden.