Images

An image is a complete copy of the file system structure and data on a disk.

It is designed to quickly create a data disk, primarily, a VM boot disk. Images can be used for distributing software, e.g., OS distributions or disks with pre-installed software.

You can use images with outdated OS versions on your VMs; however, you will not be able to get support for these VMs if you have any issues.

Each image will get assigned a particular virtualized hardware generation on which you can deploy a VM instance from that image. You can assign a particular hardware generation to an image only at the time of creating it.

Once the image is created, you cannot change the generation assigned to it. Instead, you can create a new image from the current one with another hardware generation assigned.

You can create an image from a disk, snapshot, or another image. If you have an image file, you can import it to Yandex Cloud.

You can use the management console to create images of network SSDs and HDDs. To create an image of a non-replicated SSD or an ultra high-speed network storage with three replicas (SSD), use the CLI, Terraform, or API.

When you create a Windows boot disk image, specify this in the operating system type. This is important for proper CPU emulation and calculating resource usage costs.

Supported formats: Qcow2, VMDK, RAW, and VHD.

Image as a Yandex Cloud resourceImage as a Yandex Cloud resource

An image is treated as a resource, similar to a disk. Images are created in folders and inherit their access permissions from the folders in which they reside.

Images consume storage space and are retained indefinitely. Storing images is charged separately. To avoid unnecessary costs, delete unused images. For more information, see Compute Cloud pricing policy.

Image familyImage family

If you regularly update your images, you can group them into families. You can use the family name to find the latest image in the family.

Let's assume you want to upload an image of your operating system to Yandex Cloud. When creating an image, specify a family, e.g., best-linux-distro. This will allow other users to get the latest version of your operating system by specifying the family and image folder ID in the request.

Public imagesPublic images

Public images are, e.g., products and solutions from Yandex Cloud Marketplace.

You can learn how to get a list of public images here.

To make your image available to other Yandex Cloud users, grant them public access to it. To do this, assign the compute.images.user role to the All authenticated users public group. However, the compute.images.user role does not grant permission to delete or edit your image.

Images optimized for deploymentImages optimized for deployment

The feature is at the Preview stage.

Use optimized images only if you have a lot of disks and deployments.

An image can be optimized for frequent VM deployments. This speeds up the deployment of VMs and enables you to quickly expand your computing power and use the relevant tools from your own image.

Fast deployment is achieved by using multiple layers for storing data in a storage. The first layer stores the image source data, while the second one stores user data. When creating VM disks from optimized images, the first layer is reused rather than copied to a new storage location every time. Disks created from optimized images run on VMs in the same way as disks created from regular images: they can be used as boot disks and are fully available for data storage. The performance of these disks does not differ from that of regular ones.

Regular images from Cloud Marketplace are already optimized for deployment. To optimize your image, select the Optimization option when uploading the image.

By default, optimized images have a zero quota. To increase the quota, contact support.

Use casesUse cases

• Getting started with Packer
• Building a VM image with infrastructure tools using Packer
• Assigning a domain name to a web server VM
• Migrating to Yandex Cloud with Hystax Acura

See alsoSee also

• Learn how to create a VM from a custom or public image.
• Setting up a custom disk image
• Importing an image from a different cloud or folder
• Configuring image access permissions
• Disks, snapshots, and images