Ubuntu (Server) Installer and VM awareness; namely Hyper-V

[Dewin]

I run a number of Ubuntu VMs under Hyper-V and it's led me to have a few
(minor) issues and requests for future releases.  Here's a short list:

*Partitioning:*
MS's best practices for Linux on HyperV[1] recommend a few specific options
for filesystems:
  - ext4 rather than ext3 (it's more space-efficient in conjunction with
.vhdx files)
  - mkfs.ext4 –G 4096 [...] as options

It's currently not particularly easy to do this in the installer: You can't
directly set options to mkfs.ext4; even if you could, I suspect most users
are unaware of the best practices document and wouldn't set them anyways.
Additionally, there's no good opportunity to format partitions manually
after the installer writes the partition table to disk (as it immediately
copies over some files).  Right now, my "easy" solution is to allow the
installer to write the partition table, then reset the VM and manually
reformat all of the ext4 partitions in question.  The complexity of this
approach increases drastically if using LVM or encryption (though encrypted
filesystems in a VM is of dubious usefulness when the contents of the VM's
RAM might be written to the host's disk).

In a perfect world, an installer running under Hyper-V would detect it
(trivially done with `dmesg | grep HyperV`. though the exact pattern should
be fine-tuned) and ask the user if they want to apply the relevant options
during partitioning.  Likewise is presumably true for running under
VMWare/Virtualbox/xen/kvm/qemu/etc, though the optimal options for each may
vary.


*Packages:*
A number of the default packages that ubuntu-standard/ubuntu-server depend
on don't make a lot of sense on a VM; some that do aren't installed by
default.  IMHO ubuntu-server-vm/ubuntu-standard-vm metapackages or some
other reorganization of those packagse might make sense.  Some notable
instances:

- crda and iw relate to wireless devices, which VMs don't have.
- laptop-detect (unless it has a means of telling if a VM is running on a
laptop and invoking appropriate power-saving measures, but that seems
finnicky)
- linux-*-generic should be replaced by linux-*-virtual in most cases.
- Packages like lvm2 (and its dependencies) and dmeventd/dmraid/dmsetup are
less useful on VMs where fault tolerance is likely to be handled on the
host and resizing disks is more a case of "resize VHD on host, then grow
partition on guest"..
- Disk encryption on VMs may cause a false sense of security since
decryption keys (and the decrypted data) live in memory, which means it may
also hit the host's filesystem in cases where the VM is snapshotted or
otherwise saved.



[1] https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn720239.aspx

-- Daniel
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