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      Is there a list of official OpenStack-compatible images that I can download for use with Glance? (CentOS, Ubuntu, etc.)

      • by Blue Box Support ● November 17th, 2015

      • Tags:

        • glance

        • images

        • vmdk

        • qcow2

        • conversion

        • vmware

      There is.

      It includes CentOS, Cirros, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, openSUSE, and Debian.

      Please see this OpenStack document for more details.

      See also the topic User’s Guide to Cloud Images.

      General information about working with images and OpenStack is available in the OpenStack community documentation: https://docs.openstack.org/image-guide/

      Converting Third-Party Images

      If you are trying to upload a third-party image to your cluster, such as a VMDK image, you may find that your process will hang or fail, because the image is not in QCOW2 format, and/or because the image does not have the cloud-init packages installed that are required for operation on OpenStack.

      Please see https://docs.openstack.org/image-guide/ubuntu-image.html for an example of how to create an image that is compatible with OpenStack. More examples for other operating systems are on the left side of the page.

      Regarding VMDK Images

      VMDK is a VMWare format, so it won’t work directly under a KVM hypervisor, as QCOW2 will. There has to be a conversion somewhere along the way, either by the customer or by Glance.

      You can convert a VMDK image to QCOW2 with qemu-img convert -O qcow2 example.vmdk example.qcow2(see https://docs.openstack.org/image-guide/convert-images.html#qemu-img-convert-raw-qcow2-qed-vdi-vmdk-vhd for reference), but you need to make sure the image contains the proper cloud-init packages as well, before uploading.

      Glance tries to do a basic conversion when a VMDK image is uploaded, but it is not guaranteed to work - see https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/kilo-glance-image-conversion “when using qemu-img, converting vmdk->qcow2 is likely to work (but not guaranteed since VMDK support may be incomplete)”