Image Management Guide / Image Tasks |
HVM (Hardware-assisted Virtual Machine) images are sequences of raw sectors of a complete bootable disk, including a boot loader and one or more partitions with an operating system. Such images are self-contained and can be booted on hardware that supports virtualization or on a full software emulation of hardware (QEMU).
At run time, HVM images can be deployed to disks local to the hypervisor (so-called Instance Store images) or they can run off of dynamic volumes on EBS (so-called EBS-backed instances or boot-from-EBS instances). This topic covers methods for installing an HVM image into either type of EMI.
For Linux images, the required options are:
euca-install-image -i /path/to/hvm-image -n name-of-the-image -r x86_64 --virtualization-type hvm -b bucket-name-for-imageWhen installing a Windows image, an additional flag is necessary:
euca-install-image -i /path/to/hvm-image -n name-of-the-image -r x86_64 --virtualization-type hvm -b bucket-name-for-image --platform=windowsAn EBS-backed image (sometimes referred to as a "bfEBS" image) is an image with a root device that is an EBS volume created from an EBS snapshot. An EBS-backed image has a number of advantages (over an Instance Store image), including:
With this method, a single command uploads image data into Object Store and triggers a conversion task, which copies the data into an EBS volume. The volume will be the source of the snapshot behind the EBS-backed EMI.
With this method, a single command uploads image data into the Object Store and triggers a conversion task; this conversion task copies the data into an EBS volumetakes a snapshot of the volume, registers the snapshot as an EMI, and deploys the EMI as an instance.
This is a more manual method for installing an HVM image into an EBS-backed EMI. Instead of importing the image data into an EBS volume directly, a helper instance is used to copy data from the image file into the volume. The helper instance can be either an instance store or an EBS-backed instance, and can be deleted when finished. The volume will be the source of the snapshot behind the EBS-backed EMI.