Provisioning Fedora CoreOS on VMware

Fedora CoreOS is designed to be updated automatically, with different schedules per stream. Once you have picked the relevant stream, you can download the latest OVA:

Alternatively, OVA images can be manually downloaded from the download page.

For the vmware provider, Ignition requires two "guestinfo" fields to be present when the VM is first booted:

For maximum compatibility, it is recommended to use base64 encoding and to prepare the Ignition configuration as such:

An alternative to plain base64 encoding is gzip+base64 as described in the Ignition supported platforms. This is especially useful when submitting the Ignition config via govc as an inline argument. In that case the encoded config is limited to slightly under 128 KiB on Linux, 256 KiB on macOS, and 32 KiB on Windows (8 KiB if using cmd.exe or PowerShell). If your config is larger than that limit, you may be able to submit it inline after compressing it with gzip.

If your generated Ignition configuration is still too large, you will encounter an Argument list too long error or similar. The solution to that problem depends on whether you are working with vSphere or Workstation/Fusion.

For vSphere, instead of inlining the configuration file within your shell, govc allows you to specify a path to a local file with the vm.change-command and will handle reading and writing it internally, circumventing any shell limitations.

In the case of Workstation/Fusion, or as a last resort in general, there is the option to use a configuration file. Instead of setting an environment variable containing your Ignition configuration, create an ovftool compatible configuration file in the directory you are invoking from like so:

The downloaded OVA has to be imported into the Workstation or Fusion library locally. At the same time the Ignition has to be provided for it to be applied to the VM.

Afterwards you can refresh the list of VMs in the Workstation or Fusion UI and the new fcos-node01 VM should appear ready for booting. Its hardware configuration can be further customized at this point, and then powered-up.

Si vous avez défini une clé SSH pour le compte utilisateur nommé par défaut core, vous pouvez vous connecter via SSH à la machine virtuelle et explorer le système :

You can now deploy a new VM, starting from the OVA and the encoded Ignition configuration:

A new fcos-node01 VM is now available for booting. Its hardware configuration can be further customized at this point, and then powered-up:

Si vous avez défini une clé SSH pour le compte utilisateur nommé par défaut core, vous pouvez vous connecter via SSH à la machine virtuelle et explorer le système :

In case you want to spawn multiple, different VMs based on the same base image you can import it into the vSphere library for easy reuse:

Creating a new instance can now be done using the govc library.deploy command:

Note: If the vCenter has multiple datacenters and datastores, you must specify them explicitly:

Ignition supports referencing remote content in configuration and fetching it at provisioning time. For this reason, on first-boot FCOS instances try to perform network autoconfiguration via DHCP.

If your VMware setup employs static network configuration instead, you can override this automatic DHCP setup with your own custom configuration. Custom networking command-line ip= parameter can be configured via guestinfo properties as shown below, before booting a VM for the first time.

The provisioning flow follows the usual steps, plus an additional guestinfo.afterburn.initrd.network-kargs entry.

The full syntax of the ip= parameter is documented in Dracut manpages.

For further information on first-boot networking, see Afterburn documentation.