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Frequently Asked Questions

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Gregory Murray edited this page Aug 23, 2016 · 38 revisions

Q. How do I get started with Photon OS?

A. You can download the latest Photon OS binaries and documentation including the Getting Started Guides in the Photon OS GitHub Wiki. Photon OS has been validated on vSphere 5.5, vSphere 6.0, vCloud Air, VMware Fusion, and VMware Workstation.

Q. What kind of support comes with Photon OS?

A. Photon OS is supported through community efforts and direct developer engagement in the communities. Potential users of Photon OS should start with the Photon microsite.

Developers who might want the source code, including those interested in making contributions, should visit the Photon OS Github repository.

Q. How can I contribute to Photon OS?

A. We welcome community participation in the development of Photon OS and look forward to broad ecosystem engagement around the project. Getting your idea into Photon OS is just a GitHub pull request away. When you submit a pull request, you'll asked to accept the Contributor License Agreement (CLA).

Q. How is Photon OS patched?

A. Within a major release, updates will be delivered as package updates. Security updates will be delivered on an as-needed basis. Non-security related updates will happen quarterly, but may not include every, single package update. The focus is on delivering a valid, functional updated stack every quarter.

Photon OS isn't "patched," as a whole - instead, individual packages are updated (potentially, with patches applied to that individual package). For instance, if a package releases a fix for a critical vulnerability, we'll update the package in the Photon OS repository, for critical issues probably within a day or two. At that point, customers get that updated package by running, "tdnf update "

Q. How does Photon OS relate to VMware’s announcement of Project Lightwave?

A. Project Lightwave is an open-sourced project that provides enterprise-grade identity and access management services, and can be used to solve key security, governance, and compliance challenges for a variety of use cases within the enterprise. Through integration between Photon OS and Project Lightwave, organizations can enforce security and governance on container workloads, for example, by ensuring only authorized containers are run on authorized hosts, by authorized users.

Q. Will VMware continue to support other container host runtime offerings on vSphere?

A. YES, VMware is committed to delivering an infrastructure for all workloads, and for vSphere to have the largest guest OS support in the industry and support customer choice. Toward those goals, VMware will continue to work with our technology partners to support new Guest Operating Systems and container host runtimes as they come to the market. Open-sourcing Photon OS will enable optimizations and enhancements for container host runtimes on VMware Platform are available as reference implementation for other container host runtimes as well.

Photon OS

Q. What is Photon OS?

A. Photon OS is an open source, Linux container host runtime optimized for VMware vSphere®. Photon OS is extensible, lightweight, and supports the most common container formats including Docker, Rocket and Garden. Photon OS includes a small footprint, yum-compatible, package-based lifecycle management system, and can support an rpm-ostree image-based system versioning. When used with development tools and environments such as VMware Fusion®, VMware Workstation™, HashiCorp (Vagrant and Atlas) and a production runtime environment (vSphere, VMware vCloud® Air™), Photon OS allows seamless migration of containers-based Apps from development to production.

Q. How to report a security vulnerability in Photon OS?

A. VMware encourages users who become aware of a security vulnerability in VMware products to contact VMware with details of the vulnerability. VMware has established an email address that should be used for reporting a vulnerability. Please send descriptions of any vulnerabilities found to [email protected]. Please include details on the software and hardware configuration of your system so that we can duplicate the issue being reported.

Note: We encourage use of encrypted email. Our public PGP key is found at kb.vmware.com/kb/1055.

VMware hopes that users encountering a new vulnerability will contact us privately as it is in the best interests of our customers that VMware has an opportunity to investigate and confirm a suspected vulnerability before it becomes public knowledge.

In the case of vulnerabilities found in third-party software components used in VMware products, please also notify VMware as described above.

Q. Why is VMware creating Photon OS?

A. It's about workloads - VMware has always positioned our vSphere platform as a secure, highly-performant platform for enterprise applications. With containers, providing an optimized runtime ensures that customers can embrace these new workload technologies without disrupting existing operations. Over time, Photon OS will extend the capabilities of the software-defined data center such as security, identity and resource management to containerized workloads. Organizations can then leverage a single infrastructure architecture for both traditional and cloud-native Apps, and leverage existing investments in tools, skills and technologies. This converged environment will simplify operation and troubleshooting, and ease the adoption of Cloud-Native Apps.

Photon OS can provide a reference implementation for optimizing containers on VMware platforms across compute, network, storage and management. For example, Photon OS can deliver performance through kernel tuning to remove redundant caching between the Linux kernel and the vSphere hypervisor, and advanced security services through network micro-segmentation delivered by VMware NSX™, and more.

Q. Why is VMware open-sourcing Photon OS?

A. Open-sourcing Photon OS encourages discussion, innovation, and collaboration with others in the container ecosystem. In particular, we want to make sure the innovations we introduce to Photon to run containers effectively on VMware are also available to any other container runtime OS. Additionally, VMware is committed to supporting industry and de facto standards, as doing so also supports stronger security, interoperability, and choice for our customers.

##Q. In what way is Photon OS "optimized for VMware?" There's a continuum of efforts, here. The first demonstrable efforts, in Tech Preview 2, were a rigorous kernel sanitation. We removed all of the modules that weren't needed for a container host on vSphere. Between those two qualifications - "container host" and "on vSphere" - it turns out that there's lots of things in the general-purpose Linux kernel that aren't useful. So, we removed all of those and, as evidence of the effect, our kernel boot time in TP2 on a VMware platform was, depending on hardware, ~200ms. Obviously, user-space plays a role in overall system boot time, but getting that low opens up some interesting scenarios when you're trying to decide where to run your container application.

With the RC release, we've focused much more on runtime. We've worked closely with our guest-OS performance experts, within VMware, and our hypervisor gurus who understand the interplay of things like stolen time, hypervisor scheduling, and interrupts to give us lower overheads and better overall subsystem performance. As an example, we've seen between 11% and 26% improvement in some file IO microbenchmarks between our untuned and tuned kernels! We would love to hear any proof points for your real-world applications in Photon OS.

But, these are just the beginning. Over time, we'll continue to work within Photon OS to make applications run most efficiently and simplify operations on VMware platforms. Beyond that, we're pursuing opportunities with the hypervisor to bring the kinds of optimizations that require close coordination between the guest an hypervisor host.

Q. Why can't I SSH in as root?

A. 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.

Q. Why isn't netstat working?

A. netstat is deprecated, ss or ip (part of iproute2) should be used instead.

How to install new packages?

Q. Why isn't the yum command working in a minimal installation?

A. yum has package dependencies that make the system larger than it needs to be. Photon OS includes tdnf - 'tiny' dandified yum - to provide package management and yum-functionality in a much, much smaller footprint. To install packages from cdrom, mount cdrom using following command

 mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom

Then, you can use tdnf to install new packages. For example, to install the vim editor,

 tdnf install vim

Q. How to build new package for Photon OS??

A. Assuming you have an Ubuntu development environment, setup and get the latest code pull into /workspace. Lets assume your package name is foo with version 1.0.

cp foo-1.0.tar.gz /workspace/photon/SOURCES
cp foo.spec /workspace/photon/SPECS/foo/
cd /workspace/photon/support/package-builder
sudo python ./build_package.py -i foo

Q. I just booted into freshly installed Photon OS instance, why isn't "docker ps" working?

A. Make sure docker daemon is running. By design and default in Photon OS, the docker daemon/engine is not started at boot time. To start the docker daemon for the current session, use the command:

systemctl start docker

To start the docker daemon, on boot, use the command:

systemctl enable docker

Q. What is the difference between Minimal & Full installation of Photon?

A. Minimal is the minimal set of packages for a container runtime, plus cloud-init. Full contains all the packages shipped with ISO.

Q. What packages are included in Minimal & Full?

A. See packages_minimal.json as an example

Q. How do I transfer/share files between Photon and my host machine?

A. We are working on supporting some standard options. Currently, I am using sshfs for file sharing between host and Photon.

Q. Why is the ISO over 1GB, when I hear that Photon OS is a minimal container runtime?

A. When you mount the ISO to a machine and boot to the Photon installer, you'll be able to choose one of the installation options. Micro currently takes about 260MB; Minimal about 330MB and the Full installation option will take approximately 1.7GB.

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