Recently, we have been working with many end users who, faced with the imminent end-of-life of CoreOS Container Linux, are migrating to Flatcar Container Linux as the secure foundation for their container deployments. And, with the majority of enterprises adopting vSphere for their private clouds¹, we have heard from many of those users that fully certified support for vSphere is an important consideration in their migration decision.

Today, we are pleased to share details of our collaboration with VMware to enable the deployment of Flatcar Container Linux in a fully-supported vSphere environment. There are a number of important elements to this:

• Most prominently, Flatcar Container Linux is now listed in the vSphere Compatibility Guide as “Supported”, meaning that VMware is committed to providing full support to its customers who choose to deploy Flatcar.

• Flatcar Container Linux now ships with a vSphere-optimized build, including Open VM Tools, and testing on vSphere is integrated into our continuous integration suite, meaning every new release is validated by Kinvolk on vSphere.

• Our engineering teams continue to collaborate on multiple initiatives to further enhance the end-user experience of Flatcar Container Linux as a guest OS in vSphere, and as a foundation for Kubernetes in VMware environments.

• Kinvolk and VMware’s support teams have set up joined-up processes for collaboratively supporting our joint end user customers.

As a result of this collaboration, VMware is recommending that current CoreOS Container Linux users migrate to Flatcar Container Linux as quickly as possible, and by May 26 (the date when Red Hat will no longer provide maintenance and security updates) at the latest.

To find out how to run Flatcar Container Linux as your guest OS in vSphere, please see the documentation on running Flatcar in VMware and on how to update a VM from CoreOS to Flatcar Container Linux.

If you have decided to adopt Flatcar Container Linux as the foundation for your container environment, and want to have the peace-of-mind of enterprise support with a service level agreement (including 24x7 and joined-up support between Kinvolk and VMware), please email [email protected] to discuss a Flatcar Container Linux Subscription.