Minimal ready-to-use CentOS 8 Stream Generation 2 Gold Image

CentOS Stream is a Linux distribution where open source community members can develop, test, and contribute to a continuously delivered distribution upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), all in tandem with Red Hat developers.

Generation 2 virtual machines (Gen2 VMs) use the new UEFI-based boot architecture instead of BIOS-based architecture and have a simplified virtual hardware model and improved boot and installation times.

CentOS 8 Stream has reached its end of life and is no longer maintained by the CentOS team. Read this article with proposed ProComputers alternatives for CentOS Stream 8 EOL.

This is a minimal ready-to-use CentOS 8 Stream Generation 2 Gold Image, mainly used as a common base system on top of which other appliances could be built and tested. It contains just enough packages to run within Azure, bring up an SSH Server and allow users to login.

Main highlights:

• Azure Linux Agent and cloud-init are included.
• Accelerated Networking is supported.
• Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is enabled.
• All security updates available at the release date are included.
• Configured to use the official CentOS 8 Stream vault repositories.

Root login is disabled and only the user account specified at launch time is allowed to connect, preferably using ssh public key authentication.

Built using CentOS8 Stream 'Minimal Install' group of packages and a single 30 GiB OS disk. Both root partition and the corresponding filesystem are automatically extended during boot if the selected disk size is bigger than the default one.

Other CentOS Stream images:

• CentOS Stream 9
• CentOS Stream 8 with Latest Updates
• CentOS Stream 9 with Latest Updates
• CentOS Stream 8 with LVM

Other minimal ready-to-use images:

• CentOS 7
• Rocky Linux 8
• Rocky Linux 9
• AlmaLinux 8
• AlmaLinux 9
• RHEL 7
• RHEL 8
• RHEL 9

Why choose ProComputers?

With over 10 years of experience working with Microsoft Azure, ProComputers provides open-source software bundled together into solutions ready to be launched on-demand in the cloud.

ProComputers is a proud sponsor of the AlmaLinux OS Foundation and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation.

Red Hat and CentOS are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Red Hat or the CentOS Project.

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THIS PRODUCT IS PROVIDED AND LICENSED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, NON-INFRINGEMENT, AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.