VMware Photon OS Installation & Configuration

What is Photon OS

Photon OS is a minimal Linux container host designed to have a small footprint and tuned for VMware platforms. 
It offers following benefits
  • Optimized for vSphere – Validated on and tuned for VMware product and provider platforms.
  • Container support – Supports 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.

Photon OS is available in a few different pre-packaged, binary formats:
  • ISO Image
  • OVA
  • Amazon AMI
  • Google GCE Image

Installation

I will be demonstrating installation of Photon via ISO Image
Download ISO from here and upload it to the appropriate datastore
Create a VM for Photon OS host and boot from the ISO
This were you can choose the Type of Install. I will be choosing Minimal Install. If you require you can try with full.
Caution – If you decide to use full please ensure you have appropriate space on the datastores
It took about 38 secs to install and when you reboot it will take hardly less than 5 seconds to boot up. If you have DHCP enabled this will be end of setup
If you would like to use static IP please refer to perform static IP configuration  – Click Here

Configuration

We will be doing some initial configuration to get you going

Enable SSH

By default Photon does not permit root login to SSH.
To make yourself login as root using SSH set PermitRootLogin yes in /etc/ssh/sshd_config, and restart the sshd deamon.

Enable Docker

By default docker is preinstalled in Photon. Cool isn’t it J . You just have to enable it
You can enable and start docker using following commands
systemctl status docker
systemctl enable docker
systemctl start docker
Please refer my article on “Basic Docker CLI Commands”- http://bit.ly/2lo6FUC
I have given you couple of screenshots here

Enable Remote API on PhotonOS

Click Here for the original article. I will be walking through the steps involved
First stop docker  – systemctl stop docker
Create the config file  with following – vi /etc/default/docker
DOCKER_OPTS=\”-H tcp://0.0.0.0:2375 -H unix:///var/run/docker.sock\”
Allow port from firewall – iptables -A INPUT -p tcp –dport 2375 -j ACCEPT
Start docker – systemctl start docker
Check Status – systemctl status docker

Configure VMware Admiral

If you are not sure what Admiral please refer my article on the same – Click Here
Run VMware Admiral docker container
docker run -d -p 8282:8282 –name admiral vmware/admiral
Browse to the URL
Add a Host and starting managing it from UI if you would like instead of CLI

References

https://vmware.github.io/photon/
https://github.com/vmware/photon

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