CoreOSCoreOS is a new Linux distribution that has been re-architected to provide features needed to run modern infrastructure stacks. CoreOS is a new, lightweight Linux distribution that’s designed from the ground up to run containerized applications. The strategies and architectures that influence CoreOS allow companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter to run their services at scale with high resilience.  VMware has been working with the CoreOS team to enable the new OS to run on their vSphere platform, including integrating open-vm-tools.

VMware is focused on bringing the value of containers to our customers and helping them streamline application delivery and portability in their virtualized infrastructure.

Today VMware announced technical preview of CoreOS 494 and 522 on vSphere 5.5, and encourage our customers to take the images for a spin and help provide feedback to the development teams on improving our CoreOS support.

You can download the VMware images from the CoreOS repository:

To install CoreOS in a virtual machine you can use either the standard CoreOS ISO or VMDK image but this installation instructions target for VMDK image only as recommendation.

CoreOS on vSphere prerequisites

Verify that these tasks are complete:

1.    Read General Installation Instructions for All VMware Products.
2.    Read General Knowledge for CoreOS at https://coreos.com/docs/quickstart/

CoreOS on vSphere -installation

Installation guidance on vSphere is published in KB2104303

The above installation process will be simplified in the future when CoreOS is available as an OVA image. A preview of this is available in the 557 beta channel.

Down the road, VMware continues the collaboration with the CoreOS team to further improve integration of the OS with vSphere and vCloud Air environments.

Please provide your feedback in the VMware CoreOS community forum.