Deploy VMware Photon OS Instance

Owned by JM Lopez
Last updated: Aug 30, 2024
4 min read

Photon OS, is an open-source minimalist Linux operating system from VMware that is optimized for cloud computing platforms, VMware vSphere deployments, and applications native to the cloud. Photon OS is a Linux container host optimized for vSphere and cloud-computing platforms such as Amazon Elastic Compute and Google Compute Engine. More info is available Introduction to Photon OS · VMware Photon OS 3.0 Documentation.

The ITS Private Cloud supports VMware Photon OS and offers two deployment methods: as OVF in our Public Content Library and as ISO file to proceed with manual installation. Deploying a VM via the content library is the quickest method to get a VM up and running in matter of minutes. However, customizing the operating system may get complex sometimes. To speed up the deployment and configuration, the minimal and full versions of Photon OS include the cloud-init service as a built-in component.

cloud-init is a set of Python scripts that initialize cloud instances of Linux machines to customize the instance without user interaction. The commands can set the root password, set a hostname, configure networking, write files to disk, upgrade packages, run custom scripts, and restart the system.

In the ITS Private Cloud, cloud-init has been used by the community for many years now, however it focused mostly on Ubuntu OS by implementing the Cloud-Init seed ISO data source, which creates a ISO image with both user-data and metadata files then read by cloud-init).

In this example we demonstrate the power of cloud-init’s VMware datasource using VM’s guestinfo interface with the vss-cli.

VMware guestinfo Interface

The data source is configured by setting guestinfo properties on a VM’s extra-config data listed in the following table:

Property

Description

Property

Description

guestinfo.metadata

A YAML or JSON document containing the cloud-init metadata.

guestinfo.metadata.encoding

The encoding type for guestinfo.metadata.

guestinfo.userdata

A YAML document containing the cloud-init user data.

guestinfo.userdata.encoding

The encoding type for guestinfo.userdata.

guestinfo.vendordata

A YAML document containing the cloud-init vendor data.

guestinfo.vendordata.encoding

The encoding type for guestinfo.userdata.

All guestinfo.*.encoding property values may be set to base64 or gzip+base64.

User data userdata.yaml

Create a userdata.yaml with all the users, packages and custom settings that you plan to use (examples are available Cloud config examples. In the following example, we instruct to create a new user vss-user, change root’s password, set timezone, hostname, fqdn, install a few packages, update existing packages and set a new MOTD providing the instance name and moref.

#cloud-config hostname: its-cloud-vm1 timezone: America/Toronto fqdn: its-cloud-vm1.eis.utoronto.ca chpasswd: list: | root:your_secure_password_here expire: False users: - name: root lock_passwd: true - name: vss-user sudo: ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL passwd: $6.... groups: sudo, wheel lock_passwd: true ssh_authorized_keys: - ssh-rsa AAAA.... packages: - git - sudo - bindutils write_files: - path: /etc/motdgen.d/001-motd-vss.sh permissions: '0755' content: | #!/bin/bash INSTANCE_ID=`vmware-rpctool "info-get guestinfo.ut.vss.instance.id"` INSTANCE_NAME=`vmware-rpctool "info-get guestinfo.ut.vss.instance.name"` printf "\n" printf " University of Toronto ITS Private Cloud Instance\n" printf "\n" printf " Name: $INSTANCE_NAME\n" printf " ID: $INSTANCE_ID\n" printf "\n" package_update: true package_upgrade: true package_reboot_if_required: true power_state: delay: now mode: reboot message: Rebooting the OS condition: if [ -e /var/run/reboot-required ]; then exit 0; else exit 1; fi # Optional: Cleanup guestinfo.userdata* and guestinfo.vendordata* # uncomment the following lines to enable. cleanup-guestinfo: - userdata - vendordata final_message: "The system is finally up, after $UPTIME seconds"

passwd values can be generated either by grabbing it from /etc/passwd of an existing system or via vss-cli misc hash-string command.

Meta data metadata.yaml

Create a metadata.yaml file which includes the networking configuration and instance-id and localhost-name. More examples can be found Networking Config Version 2:

instance-id: its-cloud-vm1 local-hostname: its-cloud-vm1 network: version: 2 ethernets: nics: match: name: ens* dhcp4: yes

Instance Deployment

For this deployment we will use the from-clib method including the --extra-config option multiple times with different key=value items. This option allows to set guestinfo.* items for the OS to pick up.

Note that --folder and --network option values may vary. Virtual machines using the EIS-VSS-CGN network will only be accessible via UofT IP addresses on-campus or via the institutional VPN service UTORvpn.

vss-cli --wait compute vm mk from-clib \ --memory 1 --cpu 1 \ --source vmware-photon-ova_uefi-4.0 \ --disk 10 \ --description 'Photon server' \ --client EIS --os photon --usage Prod \ --folder group-v4122 --net EIS-VSS-CGN \ --extra-config guestinfo.metadata.encoding=gzip+base64 \ --extra-config guestinfo.userdata.encoding=gzip+base64 \ --extra-config guestinfo.userdata=$(vss-cli misc gz-b64e userdata.yaml) \ --extra-config guestinfo.metadata=$(vss-cli misc gz-b64e metadata.yaml) \ --power-on vss-photon

When the previous command completes, you should get the allocated IP address in the “warnings” section:

If all went well, you should be able to login via the allocated IP address included in the email and ssh access should available:

There you go! We have a fully functional pre-configured virtual machine with UEFI and secure boot ready for action.

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