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zCompute—Creating Images

Support Team
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Overview

 

Zadara Compute provides three options for creating Images and/or Volumes from existing disk images:

  • upload a file via your browser
  • provide a URL from which the cloud will fetch the image
  • create from Snapshot/Volume

While uploading a file works well for smaller images, it's prone to timeouts from the browser when dealing with large uploads. For larger uploads, the latter two options should be preferred.

The native image format for Zadara Compute is qcow2, but compatible OVA images can be converted automatically by Zadara Compute (see Machine Images for details) when uploaded or provided via URL.

Other image formats—VHD, VMDK, VDI, etc—must be converted by the end-user. They can either be uploaded or provided via URL in qcow2 format, or that can be converted to RAW and written manually to a volume, see Create Image from Snapshot/Volume below.

Create Image from a URL

If the Image is hosted by a web server, you can provide the URL and the cloud will pull the Image down from the web server:

Screenshot_20231018_171225.png

Create Image from a Snapshot or Volume

If the images cannot be securely hosted for use with the download from URL option, then the third option can be used. To create an Image from a Snapshot or Volume you will need to create/use a VM to write your image data to a block Volume. You can use any tool(s) which can read an image and write to a block device.

Once you have set up the VM you will be using and installed any necessary tools:

  • copy the image to the VM using your tooling of choice (rsync, robocopy, scp, etc)
  • create/attach a new Volume of the appropriate size to the VM
  • run your imaging tool of choice to write the qcow2 image to the attached block volume

Once you've completed these steps you can use the Create Image function to create an Image from the Volume you wrote the image to:

Screenshot_20231018_172137.png

Or you can Detach the Volume and Attach it to another VM as necessary.

For example, if your machine is running linux, the most commonly used tools for this would be qemu-img and dd (this is only an example, please consult the documentation for these tools):

qemu-img convert -f qcow2 -O raw examplevm.qcow2 examplevm.raw
dd if=mycoolvm.raw of=/dev/sdb bs=1M status=progress

Or for VMWare images:

qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O raw examplevm.vmdk examplevm.raw
dd if=mycoolvm.raw of=/dev/sdb bs=1M status=progress

You can use any tool of your choosing that can write a qcow2 image to a block storage device. All versions of Windows, Linux, and BSD will have a variety of tools which can do so.
 

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