By Mark Lohmeyer, vice president of product management and marketing, Cloud Platform, VMware
Editor’s Note: This post, initially published on March 9, 2015, was updated on March 13, 2015 to reflect that CoreOS is now supported on vSphere 6.
A key driver behind vSphere’s popularity and broad adoption in the enterprise has been VMware’s commitment to choice including giving you a broad selection of supported operating systems (OS) to run. This choice applies to both traditional OSes and to an emerging group of OSes targeted for use with Linux containers. Today, VMware is announcing support for CoreOS to give you more options for managing containers on both VMware vSphere 6 (and earlier releases) and VMware vCloud Air.
Since October of last year, we have collaborated with the team at CoreOS to enable the OS to run on vSphere 6 in production. That includes joint integration work on the open-vm-tools and simplifying the deployment process by providing the OS in OVA format optimized for installation on vSphere. Read CoreOS’s blog post.
CoreOS is a new Linux distribution that has been designed to provide features needed to run modern infrastructure stacks. One of those features is containerizing applications to help developers to streamline application delivery as well as benefit from application portability.
Our goal is to simplify how enterprises run and manage their containerized applications on their vSphere environments or on vCloud Air, while minimizing complexity by reducing the need to build out new and separate infrastructure silos for their container initiatives. By offering enterprises a common platform for running virtual machines and containers, developers gain agility and speed while offering IT teams the control they need. Enterprises running containers within virtual machines can also benefit from high performance, security isolation, dynamic virtual networking, software-defined storage, and the extensive ecosystem of third-party solutions developed for virtual machines. Read Kit Colbert’s blog post on VMware + Containers.
Supported CoreOS releases begin with 557.x release and will extend to future stable releases. These will be populated in the VMware Compatibility Guide as they become available.
Getting Started
Following are few links to documentation, resources and forums to get started with CoreOS on vSphere:
