Yes, the day has come, and good news for everyone. Rocky 9 has now been released! 
Available for download here:
Have fun everyone with the new release!
Congrats to the team for pushing this out, and copious amount of beers required to celebrate this momentous day 
thanks @iwalker and thanks for everyone in the team and have a nice day everyone 
Yeah, great. Downloaded it and tried to install it on VMWare 6 ESX.
Instant kernel panic. I guess IBM/RH/Rocky/Alma think that we should all rush out (whilst prices are going through the roof everywhere) and buy new hardware.
What a joke!
@Mikheil And does RHEL9 or whatever show as an option when creating a VM on VMware 6? If not, complain to VMware. Don’t blame RHEL or Rocky for your VMware problems.
According to this: VMware Compatibility Guide - Guest/Host Search
RHEL9 is supported in 6.7U2 and higher. If you don’t have this, upgrade your VMware!!!
EDIT: Actually verified this on my VMware install, template 7.0U1 and higher has RHEL9 support. So the problem here is VMware.
I can’t upgrade it on a Proliant ML110, G6 with a Intel Xeon X3430 CPU. You think I throw away 5 of these servers that work perfectly with ESX 6 just to make rich people in Intel, and VMWare even richer?
I guess I’ll stick with CentOS 7 until all my servers die or I do, whichever comes first.
Wow yeah, ML110 G6 which was released in 2010 - 12 years ago!! Not surprising. Don’t expect new stuff to work on old hardware.
While EL9 requires a feature set called “x86-64-v2” from CPU it still runs on much older hardware than certain recent “OS”.
The x86-64-v2 requirement was announced already last year: El9 will require x86-64-v2 support
You could install Rocky 8 on the hardware, unless you expect the hardware to die within two years.
I installed last night (virtualbox guest, win10 host), no issues except the repo not populating for the netinstall (I worked around it by manually entering a https mirror). I’ve not been able to install the VBoxGuest additions under Cent 9 and the 6.1.34 additions installed fine under Rocky 9!
Are the VBoxGuest additions tied to version of kernel? Rocky 9 has same kernel as RHEL 9, while CentOS Stream 9 has something almost, but apparently still too different from RHEL 9 kernel.
don’t believe they’re tied to the kernel, in a Vbox thread someone indicated that they must have changed something. There’s a bug report with links to dev 6.5 additions. I tried installing one of them and it still crashed. I’m sure they’ll have it sorted out with the release of 6.1.3.5
is there any difference in running lxd compared to the 8.6 version? I’m asking since it will take some time before hpe proliant have their tooling and drivers ported to the 9 version.
I was able to install Rocky 9 on Esxi 7.0 update 3 by using ‘Other 5.x or later Linux (64 bit)’ without difficulty