Image Overview

An image defines what will run on a guest instance in your Eucalyptus cloud. An image contains everything necessary to boot and run an operating system: either one of the Linux distributions – CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, etc – or one of the supported Windows server versions.

Images of two types are supported by Eucalyptus:
Depending on the method used for upload, an instance's disk will reside on one of two types of storage:

To help get you started, Eucalyptus provides pre-packaged virtual machine images that are ready to run in your cloud. You can download them from the Eucalyptus Machine Image catalog. Both HVM and paravirtual images are available there. Each paravirtual image comes bundled with a corresponding EKI and ERI.

If you find that the pre-packaged images don't meet your needs, you can migrate an image from another cloud system (such as Amazon Web Services) or create your own image. See the rest of this guide for more information.

Tip: For a list of supported guest operating systems, see the Compatibility Matrix in the Release Notes.