===================================== Disk and container formats for images ===================================== When you add an image to the Image service, you can specify its disk and container formats. Disk formats ~~~~~~~~~~~~ The disk format of a virtual machine image is the format of the underlying disk image. Virtual appliance vendors have different formats for laying out the information contained in a virtual machine disk image. Set the disk format for your image to one of the following values: aki An Amazon kernel image. ami An Amazon machine image. ari An Amazon ramdisk image. iso An archive format for the data contents of an optical disc, such as CD-ROM. qcow2 Supported by the QEMU emulator that can expand dynamically and supports Copy on Write. raw An unstructured disk image format; if you have a file without an extension it is possibly a raw format. vdi Supported by VirtualBox virtual machine monitor and the QEMU emulator. vhd The VHD disk format, a common disk format used by virtual machine monitors from VMware, Xen, Microsoft, VirtualBox, and others. vmdk Common disk format supported by many common virtual machine monitors. Container formats ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The container format indicates whether the virtual machine image is in a file format that also contains metadata about the actual virtual machine. .. note:: The Image service and other OpenStack projects do not currently support the container format. It is safe to specify ``bare`` as the container format if you are unsure. You can set the container format for your image to one of the following values: aki An Amazon kernel image. ami An Amazon machine image. ari An Amazon ramdisk image. bare The image does not have a container or metadata envelope. docker A docker container format. ovf The OVF container format.