SLC6 VOBoxes hosted on the Service Consolidation infrastructure (virtual machines hosted by HyperV hypervisors) will receive new paravirtualization drivers together with OSDATE 20120504. These new drivers are meant to improve performance and stability of virtual machines.

The following changes are noticeable:

• disks will be seen as "sda", "sdb" instead of "hda", "hdb" with previous driver versions. This however does not affect normal partition mounts and unless users have performed advanced configuration explicitly referencing "hda" or "hdb" disks, the change will not affect existing machines. LVM partitions are not affected, even if created manually. Existing partition definitions in CDB do not need to be updated.
• the /boot partition must be at least 512MB for new SLC6 VOBox Virtual Machines. A /boot partition of 256MB will not be sufficient anymore for kdump to properly generate the kernel for use on panic, and will prevent the VM from booting successfully with kdump enabled (kdump is enabled by default on SLC6 VOBoxes). Alternatively, the kdump service may be disabled in order to accommodate a small /boot partition.