Adding a New Linux Distribution on System Center VMM 2012 R2’s list of Operating Systems

For hosters who use Windows Azure Pack along with System Center VMM 2012 R2, they might find that sometimes they need to support a XYZ Linux distribution for their customers. However they’ll quickly find they can’t get that distribution to display correctly on the Azure Portal as the only option to choose is “Other Linux”. Here’s a SQL query that anybody can use to inject a custom Operating System into VMM’s database:

USE [VirtualManagerDB]
GO

INSERT INTO [dbo].[tbl_IL_OS]
([OSId]
,[Name]
,[Description]
,[Architecture]
,[OSFlags]
,[VMWareGuestId]
,[OSType])
VALUES
('EBAB54C0-A9FA-4A3F-A21C-94775B96A6E5' /* Generate UUID */
,'Debian GNU/Linux 6 (64-bit)' /* Limited to 64 Chars */
,'Debian GNU/Linux 6 (64-bit)' /* Longer description of Linux Distro */
,'amd64' /* Use x86 for i386, amd64 for x86_64 */
,'28' /* This remains constant */
,'otherLinux64Guest' /* This is meant for VMware, go lookup the VMX spec files for this value */
,'1') /* Leave this at one, that's what the other OSes looked like */
GO

If you installed VMM 2012 R2 with a different SQL database name, adjust the USE statement accordingly.