Disk and container formats for images¶
When you add an image to the Image service, you can specify its disk and container formats.
Disk formats¶
The disk format of a virtual machine image is the format of the underlying disk image. Virtual appliance vendors have different formats for laying out the information contained in a virtual machine disk image.
Set the disk format for your image to one of the following values:
- aki
- An Amazon kernel image.
- ami
- An Amazon machine image.
- ari
- An Amazon ramdisk image.
- iso
- An archive format for the data contents of an optical disc, such as CD-ROM.
- qcow2
- Supported by the QEMU emulator that can expand dynamically and supports Copy on Write.
- raw
- An unstructured disk image format; if you have a file without an extension it is possibly a raw format.
- vdi
- Supported by VirtualBox virtual machine monitor and the QEMU emulator.
- vhd
- The VHD disk format, a common disk format used by virtual machine monitors from VMware, Xen, Microsoft, VirtualBox, and others.
- vhdx
- The VHDX disk format, an enhanced version of the VHD format, which supports larger disk sizes among other features.
- vmdk
- Common disk format supported by many common virtual machine monitors.
Container formats¶
The container format indicates whether the virtual machine image is in a file format that also contains metadata about the actual virtual machine.
Note
The Image service and other OpenStack projects do not currently
support the container format. It is safe to specify bare as
the container format if you are unsure.
You can set the container format for your image to one of the following values:
- aki
- An Amazon kernel image.
- ami
- An Amazon machine image.
- ari
- An Amazon ramdisk image.
- bare
- The image does not have a container or metadata envelope.
- docker
- A docker container format.
- ova
- An OVF package in a tarfile.
- ovf
- The OVF container format.
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