Image service¶

Info

Some of these instructions require use of Openstack command line tools.

Images provided by Safespring in the platform¶

Safespring provides images from the following distributions and operating systems:

Centos
Debian
Ubuntu
Windows

Safespring does not make any modifications to the images but sources them from the upstream provider from the official OpenStack image repos.

Safespring make sure the following either works directly, or provide documentation for how to make it work for the images uploaded to the platform:

The checkssum provided by the upstream provider should match the checksom of the image uploaded to the platform
The the images can boot on a new instance
A new instance booted from the image gets an IPv4 and IPv6 adress
The the SSH-key provided at creation of a new instance gets properly injected into the "authorized_keys"-file of the instance
The the instance can connect to a network with one interface.

Uploading an image by customer¶

Size limit using the web interface¶

While it is possible to upload images using the Horizon web interface there is currently a 2G size limit. For larger images, using the command line tools will work or asking the openstack software to DL the image from an URL you supply.

Image format support¶

Due to how we use Ceph as the image backend store all images in the image service are converted to raw format before they are booted. This implicates that to avoid this from happening EVERY time a new instance is booted images need to be uploaded in raw format only.

If a large image is uploaded in e.g qcow2 format the at-boot conversion of it will take a long time, making the boot process seem stuck.
Please use external tooling to convert your images to raw before uploading.

We have plans to mitigate and better work around some of these limitations.

Downloading an image based on an existing instance¶

Downloading an image based on an existing instance currently requires running Openstack cli commands and cannot solely be done through the Horizon webui.

Create a snapshot from an existing instance (either via openstack cli or in the Horizon webui).

Note

Creating a snapshot takes some time since the whole instance disk image will be uploaded to the Glance image service over a network connection. This will be the time to get some coffee.
From the command line, list the all images in the project and verify that the snapshot is visible:
```
glance image-list
```

Use the following commmand to download the image to local storage:

glance image-download _uuid_of_previously_created_snapshot_ \
    --file _local_filename_to_save_raw_image_to_ \
    --progress

Launching a new instance based on an uploaded custom image¶

Uploading a raw image can be done through the command line:

glance image-create \
    --file _path_to_local_raw_image_ \
    --disk-format=raw \
    --name _name_of_image_ \
    --property architecture=x86_64 \
    --protected False \
    --visibility private \
    --container-format bare \
    --progress

After the upload have finished, verify that the image is visible:

glance image list

The uploaded image can now be used to launch new instances. In the Horizon webui, navigate to Compute -> Images. The uploaded image should now be visible in the list. Click the Launch button to the right of the uploaded image and fill in instance information as usual.

Changing disk type on an image¶

If your disk image comes from an existing installation of another virtualization kit, the OS on the inside might have a limited amount of drivers and specifically might be lacking the virtio drivers which are generally considered the most performing ones.

Booting without correct drivers will mostly end up in some kind of recovery mode in early boot at best, so changing the disk-type of an image is sometimes vital during import.

You will need the image ID, either by looking at the web portal or running glance image-list. Then change the bus type to something you expect will work.

IDE would be the safest for older OSes, but least performant since IDE never can have multiple I/Os in flight so a guest using IDE will never issue them in parallel even if our underlying storage would handle it. The other alternatives include "scsi", "usb" and the default "virtio".

glance image-update \
    --property hw_disk_bus=ide \
    abcd-defg-12345678-901234-abcd

Migrations could be made with a changed bus type on an imported disk image from another system, then from within the instance you update and/or install virtio drivers and shutdown the instance, then make a new image from the virtio-capable volume and then start a normal virtio-only instance using the second image and lastly delete the first instance.

This can also be used to change the network card type, using the property hw_vif_model. Default is virtio but the list also has e1000, ne2k_pci, pcnet, rtl8139 where e1000 emulates an Intel Pro gigabit ethernet card, and the others are different versions of old chipsets almost never used nowadays. This is rarely needed.