1. Concepts Guide
  2. Compute Instance Concepts
  3. Bring Your Own Image (BYOI)

Bring Your Own Image (BYOI)

The Bring Your Own Image (BYOI) feature enables you to import your own versions of operating systems into Private Cloud Appliance as long as the underlying hardware supports it. The services do not depend on the OS you run.

The BYOI feature provides these benefits:

  • Enables cloud migration projects.

  • Supports both old and new operating systems.

  • Encourages experimentation.

  • Increases infrastructure flexibility.

Important:

You must comply with all licensing requirements when you upload and start instances based on OS images that you supply.

A critical part of any lift-and-shift cloud migration project is the migration of on-premises virtual machines (VMs) to the cloud. You can import your on-premises virtualized root volumes into Private Cloud Appliance using the custom image import feature, and then launch compute instances using those images.

You can import Microsoft Windows and Linux-based custom images and use them to launch instances on Private Cloud Appliance.

Linux Source Image Requirements

Custom images must meet the following requirements:

  • The maximum image size is 400 GB.

  • The image must be set up for BIOS boot.

  • Only one disk is supported, and it must be the boot drive with a valid master boot record (MBR) and boot loader. You can migrate additional data volumes after you import the image's boot volume.

  • The boot process must not require more data volumes to be present for a successful boot.

  • The boot loader must use LVM or a UUID to locate the boot volume.

  • The disk image cannot be encrypted.

  • The disk image must be a VMDK or QCOW2 file. These images can be converted to .oci type images.

    • Create the image file by cloning the source volume, not by creating a snapshot.

    • VMDK files must be either the "single growable" (monolithicSparse) type or the "stream optimized" (streamOptimized) type, both of which consist of a single VMDK file. All other VMDK formats, such as those that use multiple files, split volumes, or contain snapshots, are not supported.

  • The network interface must use DHCP to discover the network settings. When you import a custom image, existing network interfaces are not re-created. Any existing network interfaces are replaced with a single NIC after the import process is complete. You can attach more VNICs after you launch the imported instance.

  • The network configuration must not hard code the MAC address for the network interface.

  • We recommend that you enable certificate-based SSH, however this recommendation is optional.

Microsoft Windows Source Image Requirements

  • The maximum image size is 400 GB.

  • The image must be set up for a BIOS boot.

  • Only one disk is supported, and it must be the boot drive with a valid master boot record (MBR) and boot loader. You can migrate additional data volumes after you import the image's boot volume.

  • The minimum boot volume size is 256 GB.

  • The boot process must not require other data volumes to be present for a successful boot.

  • The disk image cannot be encrypted.

  • The disk image must be a VMDK or QCOW2 file. Create the image file by cloning the source volume, not by creating a snapshot. VMDK files must be either the "single growable" (monolithicSparse) type or the "stream optimized" (streamOptimized) type, both of which consist of a single VMDK file. All other VMDK formats, such as those that use multiple files, split volumes, or contain snapshots, are not supported.

  • The network interface must use DHCP to discover the network settings. When you import a custom image, existing network interfaces are not re-created. Any existing network interfaces are replaced with a single NIC after the import process is complete. You can attach additional VNICs after you launch the imported instance.

  • The network configuration must not hard code the MAC address for the network interface.