Disk and Container Formats

When adding an image, you must specify the virtual machine image disk format and container format. Disk and container formats are configurable on a per-deployment basis. The following lists all supported container and disk formats.

Disk Formats

The disk format of a virtual machine image is the format of the underlying disk image.

You can set your image’s disk format to one of the following:

• raw: An unstructured disk image format.
• vhd: A common disk format used by virtual machine monitors from VMWare, Xen, Microsoft, VirtualBox, and others.
• vmdk: A common disk format supported by many common virtual machine monitors.
• vdi: A disk format supported by VirtualBox virtual machine monitor and the QEMU emulator.
• iso: An archive format for the data contents of an optical disc; for example, a CD-ROM.
• qcow2: A disk format supported by the QEMU emulator that expands dynamically and supports copy on write.
• aki: An Amazon kernel image stored in Glance.
• ari: An Amazon ramdisk image stored in Glance.
• ami: An Amazon machine image stored in Glance.

Container Formats

The container format indicates the virtual machine image file format that also contains metadata about the virtual machine.

Set your image container format to one of the following:

• bare: Indicates there is no container or metadata envelope for the image.
• ovf: Indicates that this is the OVF container format.
• aki: An Amazon kernel image stored in Glance.
• ari: An Amazon ramdisk image stored in Glance.
• ami: An Amazon machine image stored in Glance.
• ova: An OVA tar archive file stored in Glance.

See also:

Adding Images