Linux - 6

I bumped into couple of issues earlier. Article about missing Integration Services and Networking Status: degraded.

RedHat managed to package the Integration Service drivers into RHEL 6.4 which essentially is the base of CentOS 6.4. So, from now on the much required drivers are bundled in the installation source.

There are no major changes in the drivers, though. Network status is still degraded and a hint of upgrading the drivers is there. It seems to be a mystery to everybody how to do the upgrade.

The list of integration services is unchanged:

• Operating system shutdown
• Time synchronization
• Data Exchange
• Heartbeat
• Backup (volume snapshot)

This article in Microsoft's social network describes the changes. Looks like Dynamic Memory (ballooning) is the only new feature. That wasn't even in the RHEL 6.4 beta, but they pushed it into final release.

Earlier I wrote about running CentOS 6.3 with Windows 8 Hyper-V.

One day I realized that the status of my network says: Degraded (Integration Services upgrade required). Well... I dunno what that means. Everything seems to work, but if there are any issues I'm not noticing them.

According this conversation at Microsoft's social network, somebody else is having this issue too. They are not noticing anything wrong either. Except the fact that status is degraded. I did try fiddling around with virtual network settings, but no avail.

I guess it is fully working after all.

Windows 8 Pro comes with Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization platform. If you have new and beefy PC, it is likely that the CPU supports Hyper-V (Celeron owners, don't bother). Everybody needs couple of Linuxes running inside your Windows, right? At least I do.

Getting the newly installed CentOS 6.3 to support networking is a bitch. After the CentOS installation finishes you're left on a virtual console screen with little possibilities of getting to outside world from your sandbox. The Wikipedia article about the subject reveals, that Microsoft had to submit their code into Linux kernel to comply with GPL license requirements. But still, CentOS 6.3 has kernel 2.6.32, but the much needed Hyper-V kernel modules are not available. Darn!

It took me an hour of Googling around, before I ended on Microsoft web page titled Linux Integration Services Version 3.4 for Hyper-V. I got the .ISO image, mounted it into my virtual Linux and run the install script. Yesh! The script managed to get my NIC to appear as eth0. After that it was just a breeze to get it configured with DHCP-client. It's a pity that nobody clearly documents this part of the installation process. People could save hours of work if somebody said to go get them.

Apparently new Linux distros come with Hyper-V drivers built in. In my case I need to run the same OS than my production server does.