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So we were tasked with providing a demo for BBB (BigBlueButton) , a free open-source extensively featured conference and training system. However, we are a Hyper-V house, and although we don’t mind working with VMWare or Amazon EC2, we like to work with Hyper-V!

BBB had only VMWare Ubuntu 10.0.4 based image. So we decided to try this on Hyper-V. The following are step by step on how to get your BBB 0.81 running Ubuntu 10.0.4 to work on Hyper-V using Static IP and Public Network:

Steps:

1. Download the image from: https://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki/BigBlueButtonVM

2. Convert .vmdk to .vhd or .vhd (then later to .vhdx for HV2012 using a free tool from the nice people at Star Wind Software: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/converter

3. Create a Hyper-V Machine with standard hard disk and legacy network card attached to your Public Network

4. Attach the .vhd disk to the VM machine, and turn on the VM instance

5. The VM will start slow and go through many errors. At the end it will ask you to login. Use the following login info:

user-id: firstuser

password: default

You’ll be prompted to change your password immediately after first login. To bypass having to enter ‘sudo’ before each line, type: sudo su – , you’ll be prompted for root password which you can change using: sudo passwd root

6. Once logged-in, establish a network connection by modifying your network adapter. To list your network adapter, type the command: sudo ifconfig -a , this should list something like eth0 or eth1 as network adapter.

Next, edit the file that matches your network adapter inside: /etc/network/interfaces/  , you need to use vi as that is the only installed editor  in the bigbluebutton machine.  Edit the file to look similar to this (but change the IPs to match your network public IP addresses):

=========
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
address 192.168.217.131
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.217.1
broadcast 192.168.217.255
gateway 192.168.217.1
dns-nameservers 8.8.8.8
==========

Then restart the network stack using the command: 

      sudo restart network-manager  , then run a quick ping test to make sure net is up


7. Now begins the work of upgrading the server to a version that supports Hyper-V Integration tools.
In here we will upgrade to version 12.04, so type the following:


sudo apt-get install update-manager-core


sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade & sudo apt-get autoremove


sudo do-release-upgrade

Follow the prompts and continue the upgrade. Restart the server afterwards to complete the upgrade
process.
8. Once logged back into the machine and the upgrade completed, you can verify your Ubuntu version

by typing: cat /etc/*-rel*

9. Begin installing BBB libraries by running these commands:
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get upgrade
    sudo apt-get install bigbluebutton
10. This should complete the install. Check that all necessary services are running using:
sudo bbb-conf --check

Sometimes the Red5 service fails to start and that is mainly because the $JAVA_HOME variable is not defined

inside /etc/environment. Another thing to check is /etc/init.d/red5 file as the Java Home path might be

hardcoded and therefore you need to make sure your existing Java folder matches the one in red5 file.