Kali Linux in Hyper-V system

With little effort you can have a pleasant experience using Desktop Linux in Hyper-V environment.

Posted on 4 mins read

Kali Linux on Windows

Most of the time a Kali Linux instance running in WSL is more than enough to have some fun in a Windows box. Using WSL is really simple but I have a couple of annoying problems that make my experience uncomfortable.

  1. UI experience is sluggish, and annoying
  2. I have very little control over networking.

Point 2 is the major pain point in my situation, I usually buy some inexpensive Intel i350 T2 cards on Ebay, to allow me to have at least three Network Card on my workstation. If you wonder why I like three NICs here is my typical usage pattern.

  • Intel card on the motherboard is the one used by the Host operating system
  • One of the i350 interface is used with Hyper-V virtual switch to connect to office network
  • The other i350 interface is used with Hyper-V virtual switch to connect to an isolated network.

Both the i350 interfaces are not shared with the operating system, the second one is physically connected to a port of my Microtik router that has a complete different network and is completely isolated from my office network. That is the network where I have VM to play with security, like connecting to Hack The Box or TryHackMe VPN and so on.

I always preferred VmWare virtualization system for Desktop Linux VMs, due to superior GUI performance.

I used in the past VmWare ESXi because it has a better support with management console, while in Hyper-V you are usually stuck with FullHD maximum resolution, sluggish mouse, and unable to resize. But here I was missing a nice piece of the puzzle, you can enable the enhanced connection in Hyper-V console, you just need to clone this repository https://github.com/Microsoft/linux-vm-tools.git, go to linux-vm-tools/ubuntu/18.4 and run install.sh script.

In latest Kali Linux version this is not enough, because a systemctl status xrdp.service usually shows that the service failed to start. Thanks to This article https://medium.com/@labappengineering/ubuntu-20-04-on-hyper-v-8888fe3ced64 I’ve found the solution. Basically you need to tweak /etc/xrdp/xrdp.ini to fix fsock configuration.

Xrdp ini configuration file

Figure 1: Xrdp ini configuration file

Now do not forget to try to start xrdp service, verify if it is running correctly and enable to have it autostart with the VM.

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sudo systemctl start xrdp.service
sudo systemctl enable xrdp.service

Xrdp service up and running

Figure 2: Xrdp service up and running

At this point it should work, but in my situation I needed to manually tell hyper-v to use enhanced session for that specific virtual machine.

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Set-VM -VMName <your_vm_name> -EnhancedSessionTransportType HvSocket

Now I suggest you to shutdown VM, close Hyper-V console, then restart the machine, this time when you open the console you should be prompted with a box that ask you the resolution you want to use.

Enhanced connection is now active on the vm

Figure 3: Enhanced connection is now active on the vm

As you can see from Figure 3 the icon of the Enhanced connection seems to be disabled, but if it is asking you display configuration, the console is trying to connect with xrdp. If you close that Window you can connect with the usual console, you should see a standard login but you can switch back to enhanced connection with the standard icon.

Standard console connection for the VM

Figure 4: Standard console connection for the VM

In Figure 4 you can see that the enhanced connection button is now active, you can press to switch to enhanced connection mode.

When you enable enhanced connection you have the ability to decide which connection type you want to use.

It is imperative to know that even if you are using xrdp server, connection is not done through network interface, this allow you to have the VM in a complete different network of your host, but at the same time being able to use without problem. As a proof you can turn down network connection entirely, but you still can control your machine through xrdp.

No interface is connected but I still able to access the machine through xrdp

Figure 5: No interface is connected but I still able to access the machine through xrdp

The ability to connect to the machine with standard console or enhanced one is important if you encounter problem with software running in an xrdp session.

But the question is: after all this work, do I really have more than a standard WSL2 machine that I could have started in mere minutes?. Remember that to have this setup you need to create an Hyper-V vm, going through OS installation, configure XRDP, etc. Well, first of all I can connect with full resolution.

Full resolution kali

Figure 6: Full resolution kali

Nowadays 2K or 4K monitors are the norm, being limited to FullHD makes Desktop experience a pity. It is imperative to use full monitor resolution for your VMs.

But I can also use copy and paste text from host system and the virtual machine and the overall experience is improved: mouse movement is smoother, resolution is ok, colors are ok, etc. Thanks to enhanced connection I can use a Hyper-V based Linux machine that resides on a complete different network from the host, is isolated to office machines but has a nice and smooth desktop experience through virtualization software console.

Gian Maria.