I recently have been working on a system automating CentOS 6 installs for servers. When upgrading to 6.6 my test environment (VMWare Fusion) stopped working. I got a hard kernel panic and halt on loading. Now VMware forums and CentOS site, have posts about work arounds for this. A bunch of them are complex and involve changing modules around, and other files. There is a very easy fix for this, and its detailed below.

NOTE: I am running VMware Fusion, so I will open a package, in Windows and Linux you dont have to do this, just go to the folder.

1. Stop the VM
2. Find the VM files
   1. For Fusion there will be a %Your VM%.vmwarevm file, you have to right click that and “Show package contents”
3. There should be a %Your VM%.vmx file, open that with a text editor
   1. If you are on a Mac, or other machine that likes to do smart quotes, make sure to use a program like vim or Sublime Text that doest add “smart quotes”
4. A line will read: ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000e”, change that to ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000”, just remove the last e. This changes the card from a E1000 in enhanced mode to a normal one. Now CentOS 6.6 will boot.

Here are some place people have discussed issues:

https://communities.vmware.com/message/2443777