Unable to provision nodes based on Photon OS v3

Rancher 2.x
1

We’re running ESXi 6.7.0 (15160138) and vSphere 6.7.0 (15129973) together with Rancher v2.3.4. We’re able to successfully deploy new cluster(s) using CentOS7-based templates when provisioning the nodes. However, when we try to use v3.0 of Photon OS the provisioning process fails with an “Error creating machine: Error detecting OS: OS type not recognized” which I believe is a docker-machine error.

We’ve added the following to sshd_config:

  • AllowTcpForwarding yes
  • PermitRootLogin yes
  • UsePAM yes

The template has open-vm-tools v10346 installed and Docker version 18.06.2 (6d37f41).

uname -a gives:
Linux 4.19.79-1.ph3-esx #1-photon SMP Tue Oct 22 23:53:27 UTC 2019 x86_64 GNU/Linux

During the provisioning phase we can see that Rancher is able to establish an ssh connection to the Photon-based VM and then waiting for the VMWare tools to start. After that it enters the provisioning phase and this error occurs. Any thoughts on what could be the problem here? Docker logs -f doesn’t give any clues.

2

It’s pretty much exactly what it says and you guessed; docker-machine doesn’t know what that OS is and has no provisioner for Photon, so it has no idea what to do with it.

3

:slight_smile: OK - do you have any plans on supporting Photon “in the near future”?

4

We maintain a fork of machine and would likely take a PR, but have no immediate plans of writing a provisioner for it ourselves (short of a customer deal being contingent on using it or something like that).

Since docker is already installed it would likely be similar to the RancherOS provisioner and mostly not really do much but say “ok” when machine asks for provisioning.

5

@vincent @kodo I just opened a PR for rancher-machine to provision Photon OS machines.