Linode Images (beta)

Are the images compressed? So a 6Gb root partition might only count as 2Gb of imaged space. Or is it a "file level" snapshot and not an actual image. Or…?

The quota is made up of the total space used by the data on your disk images. So a 6G root partition with only 2GB of data on it would count as 2GB against your quota.

Linode Images is now in open beta. Feel free to test this service by using the new features available in the Linode Manager. Please let us know if you have any feedback!

Wow, that's great. I suppose that when this feature is officially launched, we'll get 10GB of free image space at the account level in addition to the disk space for each Linode, with added space available as a paid option. Am I right?

–DragonLord

@Stan_Theman:

Linode Images

* Snapshot/checkpoint your Linode's disk image

• Linode Images remain under your account, free

• Deploy new Linodes, or rebuild existing ones, from the images you've saved

• API support for easy automation of creating and deploying images.

So looking at line 3, would this allow me to do the following?

Create an Arch Linux Image on my main Linode.

Create a temp Linode with that Image.

Configure it as I need it.

Save that updated Image.

Kill the temp Linda

Stop my current server (Ubuntu)

Reboot it using the newly configured Arch Image

Therefore limited downtime, no need to transfer additional data between nodes (data is all in a separate image) and so on.

@tarasis:

@Stan_Theman:

Linode Images

* Snapshot/checkpoint your Linode's disk image

• Linode Images remain under your account, free

• Deploy new Linodes, or rebuild existing ones, from the images you've saved

• API support for easy automation of creating and deploying images.

So looking at line 3, would this allow me to do the following?

Create an Arch Linux Image on my main Linode.

Create a temp Linode with that Image.

Configure it as I need it.

Save that updated Image.

Kill the temp Linda

Stop my current server (Ubuntu)

Reboot it using the newly configured Arch Image

Therefore limited downtime, no need to transfer additional data between nodes (data is all in a separate image) and so on.

I decided to use this functionality to create a ready-made "golden master", free of extraneous data yet configured for rapid deployment to a new server when needed.

What I did was create a temporary Linode based on my production Linode, delete unnecessary data, reconfigure it a bit, and put a note to self in the MOTD for when I need to update or deploy it. I then shut down the temporary Linode, imagize the resulting disk, and erase the temp Linode.

The resulting image will need to be updated from time to time. When this is needed, what I'll do is create a temporary Linode, deploy the image, update the OS and applications, and shut it down. I'll then imagize the disk, test it, delete the old image, and kill the temporary Linode. This can be done with no downtime on the production Linode and at minimal cost–I can just spin up a Linode 1024 for a few hours, costing mere pennies to bring the "golden master" up to date.

--DragonLord

Don't change anything, it's working great. That's basically my feedback. We're using Linode Images and the API to fully automate the deployment of PlushForums, as well as the nightly re-imaging of our demo server.

As DragonLord says, it's trivial to update a master image when you need to make changes. For convenience's sake I would like to see a higher storage quota, perhaps based on the number of Linodes active over a period of time. Also, are images backed up and/or mirrored across your datacentres? I wouldn't like to lose a Gold Master, for example.

I'm afraid I haven't used Images much and can't contribute anything significant, but I did run into one small snag: I entered a description that included a & character, and the manager complained that special characters aren't allowed – and erased my description and reset the title to the default. :( Not the best form handling.

(No sweat, it only took a couple seconds to fix, but it's not nice.)

@adeflit:

For convenience's sake I would like to see a higher storage quota, perhaps based on the number of Linodes active over a period of time. Also, are images backed up and/or mirrored across your datacentres? I wouldn't like to lose a Gold Master, for example.

We'd be happy to talk about adjusting your limits for Linode Images if needed - just open a ticket and we'll see what we can do.

Right now images are only stored in the data center where they were created, but we do copy them to other data centers when you try to deploy the image on a Linode outside of that image's original home. No backups are made at this time (we actually consider them a special type of backup), but I'm happy to pass this on to the rest of the team for consideration.

@mnordhoff:

I'm afraid I haven't used Images much and can't contribute anything significant, but I did run into one small snag: I entered a description that included a & character, and the manager complained that special characters aren't allowed – and erased my description and reset the title to the default. :( Not the best form handling.

(No sweat, it only took a couple seconds to fix, but it's not nice.)

I agree! We'll get this to our devs to see how we can make this process better.

Thanks for your feedback!

• Jonathan

Trying to rebuild my Linode using a custom image I get the error message: “You do not have enough unallocated storage to create this Disk (1356 requested, but only 0 available)” and I have to manually delete my current images, while using one of the standard images a rebuild automatically “destroys all data, wipes my Linode clean, and starts fresh”.

Also, it would be nice to have the ability to rename saved images.

I love this feature, by the way :)

Nice catch Joó. I'll make sure this gets passed on to our dev team.

Thanks for your feedback. :)

Good news! Now you can change an image's label and description by clicking Edit on the Manage Images page.

Enjoy :)

Nice, thanks! :)

How do you access this beta feature? When I go to my Dashboard underneath "Disks" and click "Edit" to edit my main boot disk, I don't see the "Imagize Image" button. I only have "Save Changes", "Duplicate Disk" (disabled), and "Create Image".

Thanks.

You want the "Create Image" button. Seems they renamed it.

(By the way, "Duplicate Disk" is disabled because you don't have enough unallocated disk space to duplicate the image and have a whole new copy on the node the same size as the original.)

Thanks! I'll try it out tomorrow.

Same question as above - don't seem to have access to this feature. How can it be enabled?

Hello,

It's 'on' for everyone (and has been for quite some). You can read more here: https://www.linode.com/docs/platform/linode-images

-Chris

When will this feature be out of beta?

Hi. I have just created an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server, with CSF firewall, Virtualmin/Webmin, and nothing else. This is what I consider a base system for me. But the space is 2202Mb and so it wont allow me to create an image as its greater than 2040Mb.

Do you think you'll be allowing more than 2040Mb, because I think if I cant even create a disk image of a bare bones OS with Webmin and LAMP stack, its not going to be very useful for a lot of people as I would think a lot of people would want some sort of software on their base systems they want images of.

P.S. My CentOS server images are OK, I guess CentOS uses lower space than Ubuntu, but considering Ubuntu is popular I think I should be able to create an image of that too.

EDIT: I freed up enough space with "sudo apt-get clean" but still, its a bit close!

Thanks!

This looks like a really great feature and is similar to what other providers have.

Only thing preventing me from using this is the 2gb limit. I would rather it be 10gb limit with no limit per image as I have set up my server and would use this as the basis for other but it's coming out at 3.1Gb so no good for me! :(

@amityweb:

Hi. I have just created an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server, with CSF firewall, Virtualmin/Webmin, and nothing else. This is what I consider a base system for me. But the space is 2202Mb and so it wont allow me to create an image as its greater than 2040Mb.

Do you think you'll be allowing more than 2040Mb, because I think if I cant even create a disk image of a bare bones OS with Webmin and LAMP stack, its not going to be very useful for a lot of people as I would think a lot of people would want some sort of software on their base systems they want images of.

P.S. My CentOS server images are OK, I guess CentOS uses lower space than Ubuntu, but considering Ubuntu is popular I think I should be able to create an image of that too.

EDIT: I freed up enough space with "sudo apt-get clean" but still, its a bit close!

Thanks!

Agree, I tried it recently and it failed, greater than 2 gigs. Since I use over 10 Gigs that makes sense and since the disk is like 40 or more Gigs I'm not sure there will be many people that will be able to use this service.

Just spent hours creating a new master server to use for future servers… Centos 7 (all my old ones are Centos 6).

It only has Centos 7, CSF Firewall, Apache/MySQL/PHP/Postfix and other services added by Webmin & Virtualmin. To me this is a bare minimum web server. Yet I get this now, which tells me Centos 7 takes up more space than Centos 6:

Size of disk (2355MB) is larger than the per-image limit of 2048MB.

I have cleaned up yum, have less than 2Mb in the log folder, emptied the /tmp/ folder, have less than 1Mb in my roots home folder… does anyone know what else I can delete to get this below the limit?

Update: I contacted Linode about the low limit and they can increase the limit a little in cases like mine on a case by case basis, so thats good. I would think a much higher limit may not get approved (understandably), but I only wanted a few hundred MBs so they did it, which is great. Thanks!

Why can't we build images with a script and then upload them? How does this differ from AWS's AMI builder? Thanks.