Linode Images

We're testing Linode Images, a free new feature that allows you to save and restore Linode disk images. Linode Images is now in open beta, so the features are available to you right now for testing!

You can:

• 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.

Why Linode Images?
Linode Images lets you keep gold-master images without keeping an active Linode for deployments. You can deploy new Linodes from your gold-master image with ease.

How do I use Linode Images?
Creating an Image is easily done through the Linode Manager. Select the disk image you want to save for later:



Hit "Imagize Image" and enter a description for your Image:



A job will kick off in the job queue. Once the image is saved, you can deploy with ease. You'll see your new disk image in the drop-down for the "Deploy a Linux Distribution" page:



That's it! You can also use our API to create and deploy images.

What are the limits?
For now, Linode Images is capped in two directions: space, and total count of images. You can store up to 10G of data in Linode Images. You can have up to 3 Images stored at any time. If you have more than three Linodes, you can have as many Images as you have Linodes. Linode Images only supports ext* filesystems at this time.

Participating in the beta is free. Please let us know if you have any feedback!

Thanks for helping!
-Stan

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...?

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Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)

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

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House of DragonLord, powered by openSUSE

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

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House of DragonLord, powered by openSUSE

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.

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PlushForums - Beautiful, modern discussion forums.

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.)

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Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

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.



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

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Ádám
(Eastern name order)

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!

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Ádám
(Eastern name order)

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.