rngd hangs while starting on a RHEL6 VM running on a RHEL7 Host

Issue

The rngd service hangs while starting on a RHEL6 VM, running on a RHEL7 Host. Using strace to inspect the syscalls from this service reveals that it gets stuck while reading from /dev/hwrng:

open("/proc/sys/kernel/random/poolsize", O_RDONLY) = 3
fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0444, st_size=0, ...}) = 0
mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7f0                                                                                                                                               91cd4a000
read(3, "4096\n", 1024)                 = 5
read(3, "", 1024)                       = 0
close(3)                                = 0
munmap(0x7f091cd4a000, 4096)            = 0
open("/dev/hwrng", O_RDONLY)            = 3
read(3, 

Trying to read from /dev/hwrng with another tool, like dd or cat, also causes the process to get stuck in a similar way.