VMware Photon OS 1.0 is Officially released on last week:

Gregory Murray, Product Line Manager for Cloud-Native Apps at VMware, announced about the release in blog, citing its history: “In a little more than a year, the team has evolved Photon OS from a technology preview into a mature operating system available as open source software that’s been vetted by VMware engineering, support and guest OS validation teams as well as thousands in the community.”

Introduction:

Photon OS is a Linux container host optimized for vSphere and cloud-computing platforms such as Amazon Elastic Compute and Google Compute Engine. Photon OS is lightweight and extensible. It supports the most common container formats, including Docker, Rocket, and Garden. Photon OS includes a yum-compatible, package-based lifecycle management system called tdnf and optionally works with RPM-OSTree for image-based system versioning.

There are two versions of Photon OS: a Minimal version and a Full version.

The minimal version of Photon OS is lightweight container host runtime environment best suited to managing and hosting containers. The minimal version contains just enough packaging and functionality to manage and modify containers while remaining a fast runtime environment. The minimal version is ready to work with appliances.

The full version of Photon OS includes additional packages to help you customize the system and create containerized applications. For running containers, the full version is excessive. The full version is targeted at helping you create, develop, test, and package an application that runs a container.

For more details please refer to Photon Administration Guide

Photon is intended to invite collaboration around running containerized and Linux applications in a virtualized environment.

• Optimized for vSphere – Leveraging more than a decade of experience validating guest operating systems, Photon OS is thoroughly validated on vSphere; and, because VMware is focused on the vSphere platform, we’re able to highly tune the Photon OS kernel for VMware product and provider platforms
• Container support – Compatible with container runtimes, like Docker, and container scheduling frameworks, like Kubernetes.
• 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.

This repository is intended for developers wishing to modify Photon, build their own customized ISO images or contribute to the code base.

To download Photon OS binaries, visit Downloading Photon OS.

Getting Photon OS:

Version 1.0: Photon OS is available in below pre-packaged formats.

Refer below links for more information:

Photon github Wiki

github Photon Page

Administration Guide

I hope you find this useful. Thanks for reading.