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
No
 Not a popular image format

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