Microsoft releases Linux Integration Services for Hyper-V 2.1 Beta

Today the Microsoft Virtualization Team announced the availability of the new beta version of the Linux Integration Services for Hyper-V. There are three big changes in this version:

• Virtual machines will be able to use up to 4 virtual CPU’s.
• Virtual machines will be able to synchronize their time with the parent partition.
• Virtual machines will be able to shutdown gracefully from the Hyper-V manager.

In this post I will try the new features.

Linux Integration Services for Hyper-V 2.0

First I got a Virtual machine (VM) installed as described in my previous post “Running CentOS 5.x on Hyper-V“. I used the current released stable version of the Linux Integration Services (LIS): Version 2.0.

 
On boot time VMBUS displays Version 2.0

My Hyper-V host only has a dual-core CPU. So it’s impossible for me to test the 4 CPU support. I couldn’t find any differences with 2 CPU’s.

Shutdown from Hyper-V Console

With the current version of the LIS when I press the shutdown button I get the following error:

Hyper-V Console shows the error “Failed to shut down the virtual machine.”

Time synchronization

With the current version of the LIS I had a lot of trouble with the clock of the VM getting out of sync very fast. I did a post to fix this: “Correcting time drift with CentOS on Hyper-V“.

I did not implement the fix on the VM I created for this post to demonstrate the problem:

The VM gets an offset of multiple seconds within minutes.

Linux Integration Services for Hyper-V 2.1 Beta

To get the beta drivers you need to download them from the Microsoft Connect website. (Look for the Linux Integration Services for Hyper-V project site).

I installed the new drivers in exact the same way as the 2.0.

On boot time VMBUS displays Version 2.1.2

Not only the new version number is displayed, also the new Shutdown and Timesync channels are mentioned!

Shutdown from Hyper-V Console

Pressing the shutdown button now gives a more expected result:

The VM receives the signal to shutdown and calls /sbin/poweroff

The VM is gracefully turned off.

Time synchronization

With the new LIS the time is pretty much stable, nothing NTP can handle. There is no need to change the boot command in grub anymore.

The VM only shows a minimal time difference over the course of minutes.