CentOS 6.6 Updates and Fixes for Hyper-V Guests

CentOS 6.6 was recently released. As expected, there are a few fixes and updates for Hyper-V guests.

The changes I can remember off the top of my head for Hyper-V guests are:

  • Updated KVP and VSS user-space daemons
  • CentOS 6.6 is now fully supports virtual NUMA topology presented by the host. In the past, if you have a guest that had processors and memory that spanned across more than 1 NUMA node, the guest would crash due to a bug in the kernel.
  • The hv_balloon driver should now not cause a constant 1.00 load average due to the way how the driver reported the memory pressure back to the host.

Unfortunately, the documentation says that there is experimental support for CentOS 6.6 running as a Generation 2 guest. The installer runs fine, but since there is no hyperv-keyboard driver included in the initramfs image of the installer. You will need to install CentOS 6.6 via automated means by using a kickstart file. Unfortunately, when you first boot into the system, you will notice the guest crashes with a kernel panic. This makes Generation 2 support with CentOS 6.6 somewhat pointless at this time.