With the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host 7.4, we are excited to jointly announce official support for VMware’s ESXi and vCenter. While it’s always been possible to run Atomic Host in a VMware environment, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host now supports VMware’s guest agent and can be listed as a supported guest OS. The Red Hat Atomic Image for vSphere now embeds the guest agent to provide the out-of-the-box experience and integration that end users expect.

For existing systems, the agent can be added by installing a system container with the open-vm-tools package and dependencies:

# atomic pull --storage=ostree rhel7/open-vm-tools
# atomic install --system --name open-vm-tools rhel7/open-vm-tools
# systemctl start open-vm-tools

This command will download the OCI image, leverage built-in ostree to deduplicate the container image with the host, configure the agent to run automatically, and start the service via systemd. This is the same approach we are using for other system-level tools with our container platform, OpenShift.

We think the addition of VMware’s open source implementation of VMware Tools will improve the functionality, administration, and management of Atomic Host within a VMware environment.