Supported Image Types and File Formats
When you add an image to the OpenStack Glance image service, you can specify its disk and container format.
You can find more info on supported disk and container formats in the OpenStack documentation here:
http://docs.openstack.org/image-guide/content/image-formats.html
This article describes what each of these disk formats mean and what subset is supported by Platform9:
| Format Type | Description | Supported By Platform9? | Our Comments | |
| raw/img | An unstructured disk image format; if you have a file without an extension it is possibly a raw format. | Yes (given .raw, .img, .dat, .bin extensions) | Common extensions .raw, .img, .dat, .bin | |
| qcow2 | Supported by the QEMU emulator that can expand dynamically and supports Copy-on-Write | Yes | Most common file format used with Linux/KVM | |
| vmdk | Common disk format supported by many common virtual machine monitors | Yes (for VMware vSphere hypervisor) | VMDK format is commonly associated with VMware | |
| vdi | Supported by VirtualBox virtual machine monitor and the QEMU emulator | Not recommended (Will be recognized, but may or may not work depending on driver availability) | VirtualBox image files in practice may or may not work with Linux/KVM hypervisor. You might run into compatibility issues due to missing required virtualization drivers) | |
| iso | An archive format for the data contents of an optical disc, such as CD-ROM | Yes | ||
| aki | An Amazon kernel image | No | Amazon image types are not popularly used with Linux/KVM | |
| ari | An Amazon ramdisk image | No | Amazon image types are not popularly used with Linux/KVM | |
| ami | An Amazon machine image | No | Amazon image types are not popularly used with Linux/KVM | |
| vhd | The VHD disk format, a common disk format used by virtual machine monitors from VMware, Xen, Microsoft, VirtualBox, and others |
| Not a popular image format |