VMware has released the Photos OS 4.0 beta use cases. Project Photon OS is an open-source, minimal Linux container host that is optimized for cloud-native applications, cloud platforms, and VMware infrastructure. Photon OS 3.0 introduces ARM64 support, installer improvements, and updated packages. VMware invites partners, customers, and community members to collaborate on using Photon OS to run high-performance virtual machines and containerized applications. Photon OS basically is a Lightweight Linux operating system.
Use Of Photon OS
- Optimized for VMware vSphere: The Linux kernel is tuned for performance when Photon OS runs on vSphere.
- Support for containers: Photon OS includes the Docker daemon and works with container orchestration frameworks, such as Mesos and Kubernetes.
- Efficient lifecycle management: Photon OS is easy to manage, patch, and update.
- Security hardened: The kernel and other aspects of the operating system are built with an emphasis on security.
With exciting improvements to the 3.0 rev 2 release, Photon 4.0 comes with new features and capabilities, and important updates including upgrades to kernel 5.9, glibc 2.32, system 245, etc.
It is available in format such as bootable ISO, pre-installed minimal OVA customized for a VMware hypervisor environment, Amazon AMI image, Google GCE image, Azure VHD, as well as a Raspberry Pi Image that has been pre-packed and tested on ARM64 architecture. The Photon OS 4.0 Beta images can be downloaded from Get Photon OS.
What’s New in Photon 4.0
- Photon Real-Time Kernel for Powering the Telco vRAN Applications
Telco 5G is fuelling the growth of the Edge infrastructure as operators are increasingly adopting Virtual Radio Network applications. vRAN applications are expected to handle varying capacity demands, bring significant reduction in costs & enhance customer experience.
VMware has introduced the Photon Real Time kernel in Photon 4.0, optimized to run vRAN applications that demand the lowest of latencies. While Photon RT will provide a performant stack to satisfy the needs of thousands of Telco Far Edge sites running critical real time applications, VMware ESXi will help the operators seamlessly manage the infrastructure.
- Security
Photon 4.0 brings in several Security capabilities like SELinux, Security Encrypted Virtualization – Encrypted Status, and support for Intel Software Guard Extensions. With Mandatory Access Control system built directly into the Linux kernel, SELinux equips administrators with more granular access and increased flexibility. Photon OS ships with a default policy that can be customized at build time to support the needs of applications.
- Performance Optimization for vSphere with Tanzu
Photon historically has had linux-esx, a special kernel flavour, specially optimized for performance and capabilities when it is expected to run on VMware ESXi. Building on this, Photon 4.0 offers a variety of capabilities and performance improvements to the container runtime environment of vSphere with Tanzu, including faster launch times for containers and applications.
- Photon OS Components Improvements
Along with this, Photon 4.0 includes upgrades of more than 700 packages, and delivers improvements in core OS components like tdnf, pmd, network config manager etc.
To know more on Photon OS visit the following links:
- Getting Started with Photon OS – VMGuru
- What is Photon OS? – GitHub
- Download VMware Photon OS Image – VMware
- VMware Blog on Photon OS 4.0
You’ll Also Like