Changing Ubuntu Screen Resolution in a Hyper-V VM

If you install Ubuntu 14.04 inside a Hyper-V virtual machine – you automatically get all the integration components and virtualized drivers.  Including the Hyper-V video driver.  However, if you try to change the screen resolution inside your virtual machine you will notice something odd:

image

There is only one choice!

Luckily, you can change the screen resolution.  Just not here.  What you need to do is:

  1. Open Terminal
  2. Type: sudo vi /etc/default/grub
  3. Find the line starting with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT, and add video=hyperv_fb:[the resolution you want]. The resolution I want is 1280x720. So my line ends up looking like this: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash video=hyperv_fb:1280x720"
  4. Write the changes and quit vi.
  5. Run: sudo update-grub
  6. Reboot the virtual machine

Now you will get the resolution that you want!

Cheers,
Ben