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 VM (Virtual Machine) installed as described in my previous post Running CentOS 5.x on Hyper-V
. I used the current released stable version of the LIS (Linux Integration Services): Version 2.0.
My Hyper-V host only has a dual-core CPU. So, it is impossible for me to test the 4 CPU support. I could not 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:
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 mentioned fix on the VM I created for this post, to demonstrate the problem:
Linux Integration Services for Hyper-V 2.1 Beta
To get the beta drivers you need to download them from the Microsoft Connect website.
I installed the new drivers in exact the same way as the 2.0.
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:
/sbin/poweroff
Time synchronization
With the new LIS the time is pretty much stable, nothing the NTP service cannot handle. There is no need to change the boot command in grub anymore.
