Photon OS™

by VMware, Inc.
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VMware Photon OS™

Minimal Linux Container Host

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What is Photon OS™

Photon OS™ is a technology preview of a minimal Linux container host. It is designed to have a small footprint and boot extremely quickly on VMware platforms. Photon OS™ is intended to invite collaboration around running containerized applications in a virtualized environment.

  • Optimized for vSphere - Validated on VMware product and provider platforms.
  • Container support - Compatible with Docker, rkt, and the Pivotal Garden container specifications.
  • Efficient lifecycle management - Contains a new, open-source, yum-compatible package manager that will help make the system as small as possible, but preserve the robust yum package management capabilities.

See the FAQ for more information.

Getting Photon OS™

If you want a quick and easy way to install Photon OS™ just about anywhere, you can grab one of the pre-built ISO images:

If you'd like to use Photon OS on VMware Fusion, Workstation, or vSphere, you can either create a VM and install from the ISO, above, or try importing the Photon OS OVA, found here. The OVA, in addition to providing a simple way to get up and running, contains some enhancements that make Photon OS boot faster and run more efficiently.

If you'd like to use Photon OS on vCloud Air, look for Photon OS in the public catalog.

If you'd like to experiment with Photon OS on other IaaS providers, here are some experimental versions in native formats of popular cloud providers:

The images are distributed under the VMware Technology Preview License Agreement. Open source license information may be found in Photon OS™ Open Source License file.

Photon OS™ source code is available on the VMware Photon™ GitHub source repository. You can build your own Photon OS™ ISO image by cloning the repo and following the instructions in README.md.

Getting Started

We've provided a few guides to help get you started:

Photon OS™ on VMware Fusion

Get Started

Photon OS™ on VMware vSphere 5.5
and 6.0

Get Started

Photon OS™ on Google Compute Engine

Get Started

Photon OS™ on vCloud Air

Get Started

Support

Photon OS™ is released as open source software and comes with no commercial support.

But since we want to ensure success and recognize that Photon OS™ consumers might fall into a range of roles - from developers that are steeped in the conventions of open-source to customers that are more accustomed to VMware commercial offerings, we offer several methods of engaging with the Photon OS™ team and community.

For our developer community, feel free to join our Google groups at vmware-photon-os-dev

For more general user questions, visit the Photon OS™ user forum in our Photon OS™ VMware Community.

Contributors

Krishna Ganugapati Sriram Nambakam Touseef Liaqat Sharath George Priyesh Padmavilasom Mahmoud Bassiouny Divya Thaluru Greg Murray

Contributing

The Photon project team welcomes contributions from the community. If you wish to contribute code, we require that you first sign our Contributor License Agreement and return a copy to osscontributions@vmware.com before we can merge your contribution.

License

Photon™ is comprised of many open source software components, each of which has its own license that is located in the source code of the respective component as well as documented in the open source license file accompanying the Photon™ distribution.

The Photon™ pre-built ISO images are distributed under the Photon™ Technology Preview License Agreement.