VMWare Virtual Machine Targets for KOS

Purpose

With KOS Studio, you can run an Image in a Simulator or on physical hardware. While a simulator works for many purposes, there may be situations where you might want to use a more mainstream virtualization environment. We have developed ISOs for both x64 and arm64 architectures that allow you to install KOS to a VMWare Virtualization environment. This document describes the details for installing to VMWare.

Environments

We have tested with:

  • VMWare Workstation Pro 17 for Linux (x64)
  • VMWare Workstation Pro 17 for Windows (x64)
  • VMWare Fusion Pro 13.6 for MacOS (ARM64)

ISOs

[Development Versions]

x64 ISO
arm64 ISO

Instructions

  • In VMWare, create a new VM with the ISO you downloaded. Recommended Settings: 4GB of RAM, 4GB Disk.  It should be set for “Other Linux 6.x kernel”. 
  • If you are running on an x64 host, you will need to configure the virtual machine firmware type to UEFI. You can do this by clicking the VM Settings->Options->Advanced and selecting UEFI. VMWare Fusion seems to default to a UEFI firmware type, so this is unneeded on MacOS/arm64.
  • Run the system.  It will automatically install KOS and then reboot into KOS.
  • When KOS boots, you will see the IP Address on the node manager screen. KOS Studio should also discover it automatically.
  • When configuring your KOS Image, you must use the KOS versions >= 1.8.0

Troubleshooting

  • Installation has been validated with the default hardware configuration in VMWare for the versions of VMWare referenced above. If later versions of VMWare are used or the hardware configuration for your virtual machine is changed, unexpected results may occur.