Linode Images (beta)
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:
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Hit "Imagize Image" and enter a description for your Image:
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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:
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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~
Edited by Linode Staff on March 19, 2019:
Removed broken image links — please refer to our documentation on Images for up-to-date information.
Updated API Images link.
Struck out incorrect information — the Images limit of 3 does not increase based on the number Linodes you have.
25 Replies
–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
PlushForums
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.
(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
Also, it would be nice to have the ability to rename saved images.
I love this feature, by the way
Thanks for your feedback.
Manage Images
Enjoy
Thanks.
(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.)
It's 'on' for everyone (and has been for quite some). You can read more here:
-Chris
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!
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.
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?
Why can't we build images with a script and then upload them? How does this differ from AWS's AMI builder? Thanks.