RHEL Server and RHEL Atomic Host

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host (RHEL Atomic Host) is a variant of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (RHEL Server) designed and optimized to run Linux Containers. On the surface both variants look quite similar.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server is designed as a general purpose operating system for all of your applications and some customers are running 1000s of instances in production – RHEL Server provides flexibility to configure each of the instances as necessary for its workload. This flexibility comes at a cost, management is fundamentally more complex and handled with more traditional tools.

VMware Guest Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host

Starting at Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host 7.4, VMware has support this operating system as VMware Guest OS officially. Maybe, there is need to upgrade or apply patch on ESXi to support the OS.

Also from now, Red Hat Atomic Image for vSphere 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