Sunday, June 30, 2019

What is the VMware Photon OS

Photon OS is an Open-Source Linux developed by VMware for cloud-native applications such as vCloud Air and virtual infrastructure services, like vSphere. Photon OS is used especially for VCSA6.x & SRM8.x as the guest OS of OVF. VMware announced because of costumer's needs to an environment to provide consistency development through production. Considering all aspects of infrastructure: Computing, Networking and Storing, Photon OS provides a fully integrated platform to make sure all of these will provide all abilities that are required by VMware platform's App developers and costumers. 
Photon OS supports running of highly-applicable Containers (Rocket, Docker  & Garden) and also developer Apps that must be deployed in to the Containers. Beside Project Lightwave (as another open-sourced project for Access / Identity management) Container deployed by Photon OS and all of their Workloads will be protected by security enforcement.
Although current version of Photon OS is ver3.0 but historically each version introduce many optimization features around VMware environments (like Kernel Message Dumper in ver2.0). Updates for Photon OS always delivered as the Package (yum & rpm are supported), also you can upgrade this product in-place with an offline downloaded package and then run (there is no patch):

# tdnf install photon-upgrade   
# photon-upgrade.sh

If you install VCSA (with built-in photon OS) you need to provide almost 10GB RAM, but minimum recommended free memory for Photon itself is 2GB. As VMware mentioned resource requirement highly depends on installation types  (Minimal, Full, OSTree Server), virtualization environment (ESXi, Workstation or Fusion), Linux kernel (Hypervisor optimized or Generic) and distribution file (preinstalled OVA/OVF or a more complex setup with ISO). It's good to know about installation types of Photon OS:
 1.Minimal: Lightweight version and the best choice for Container providing.
 2.Full: With additional package and the better option for development of container-based application.
 3.OSTree Server: This one is suitable as a repository and also management node for all other Photon OS hosts and also.
All in the Hypervisor optimized kernel type, you all have required for virtualization by VMware hypervisor not anymore components, then they will be removed. So selecting Generic means needs all. To provide Docker feature you need to do:

# systemctl start docker           Run the daemon service
# systemctl enable docker        Enable service startup

With respect to opinions and discussions about development and security considerations of virtual infrastructure services, VMware release Photon OS as an open-source product, then it can support other public cloud environment, for example: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Google Compute Engine (GCE) and Microsoft Azure. To read more about Photon OS you can refer to following links:
And also you can download its source from following GitHub link:

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