Supported Image Types and File Formats

When you add an image to the PMO image catalog, you can specify its disk and container format. This article describes the various supported disk and file formats and what subset is supported by PMO.

You can find more info on supported disk and container formats in the OpenStack documentation here: http://docs.openstack.org/image-guide/content/image-formats.html

Format Type	Description	Supported by Platform9	Our Comments
raw/img	An unstructured disk image format; if you have a file without an extension it is possibly a raw format.	Yes (given .raw, .img, .dat, .bin extensions)	Common extensions .raw, .img, .dat, .bin
qcow2	Supported by the QEMU emulator that can expand dynamically and supports Copy-on-Write	Yes	Most common file format used with Linux/KVM
vmdk	Common disk format supported by many common virtual machine monitors	Yes (for VMware vSphere hypervisor)	VMDK format is commonly associated with VMware
vdi	Supported by VirtualBox virtual machine monitor and the QEMU emulator	Not recommended (Will be recognized, but may or may not work depending on driver availability)	VirtualBox image files in practice may or may not work with Linux/KVM hypervisor. You might run into compatibility issues due to missing required virtualization drivers)
iso	An archive format for the data contents of an optical disc, such as CD-ROM	Yes	-
aki	An Amazon kernel image	No	Amazon image types are not popularly used with Linux/KVM
ari	An Amazon ramdisk image	No	Amazon image types are not popularly used with Linux/KVM
ami	An Amazon machine image	No	Amazon image types are not popularly used with Linux/KVM
vhd	The VHD disk format, a common disk format used by virtual machine monitors from VMware, Xen, Microsoft, VirtualBox, and others	No	Not a popular image format

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