images cloud-ready for openstack

Question

I have a question about the images to mount on openStack. I can use any image of any operative system? I guess not... but why? I found images already suitable for openStack, but what's the different between an image cloud-ready and a normal image?

For instance, I can create a virtual machine with windows desktop? If not, why?

thank you

Answer 1

Cloud-ready images have been customised by the distro maker to run well under a hypervisor such as OpenStack, EC2, kvm, and LXC (not strictly a hypervisor) instead of on physical hardware. This entails removing packages that are only need in physical environments like wireless drivers etc, and adding packages that are useful in a cloud environment. For example during the boot process, cloud-ready images download metadata from the environment such as hostname and networking information. This data is used to "personalise" a new instance when it boots up for the first time.

If you really want to get in to the nuts and bolts of things, the Ubuntu UEC Images page has lots of details about the composition of the Ubuntu cloud images and other information like how to build one yourself.

I'm sure you can create a virtual machine running Windows desktop, but I've never had occasion to do so. If you look at the Amazon page about Windows it's all about running server apps like SQL Server and ASP.NET apps.