Bring Your Own OS Images
RamNode Cloud Custom Images let you upload your own operating systems, pre-configured templates, and virtual disk images. Deploy them just like any other cloud image for complete control over your instance environment.
What Are Custom Images Used For?
A custom image is a disk image file that you upload to your RamNode Cloud project and use as a boot source for new instances. Instead of starting from one of the standard operating system images, you can start from an image you have built, configured, or imported from another environment.
Custom images are ideal for migrating existing virtual machines, standardizing server builds, deploying specialized appliances, and maintaining golden templates that already include your applications, security policies, and configuration.
Common Use Cases
Custom images turn your cloud project into a flexible platform for any workload or migration strategy.
VM Migration
Move virtual machines from another provider or hypervisor by converting their disks to a supported format and uploading them to RamNode Cloud.
Golden Templates
Build a standardized image with your security baseline, monitoring agents, and packages pre-installed, then clone instances from it in seconds.
Specialized Appliances
Deploy custom network appliances, firewalls, storage gateways, or specialized distributions that are not available in the standard image list.
Rapid Scaling
Launch new instances from a pre-configured image instead of running lengthy install scripts on every server.
Environment Parity
Keep development, staging, and production environments identical by building and deploying from the same base image.
Custom Workflows
Use images built by Packer, other automation tools, or hand-tuned rescue environments for unique recovery or deployment workflows.
Supported Image Formats
RamNode Cloud accepts the most common virtual disk formats. If your image is in a different format, you can usually convert it with qemu-img before uploading.
RAW
A plain, uncompressed disk image. Simple and widely compatible, but larger than compressed formats.
QCOW2
QEMU Copy-On-Write format. Recommended for most uploads because it supports compression and sparse allocation.
VMDK
VMware virtual disk format. Common for images exported from VMware environments.
VDI
VirtualBox disk image format. Use this for images exported from Oracle VirtualBox.
VHD / VHDX
Microsoft Hyper-V virtual disk formats. Convert older VHD files or newer VHDX files before upload.
Snapshots
You can also create images from instance snapshots directly in the cloud control panel.
What Makes a Good Custom Image?
virtio drivers. Install virtio disk and network drivers for the best performance inside the KVM hypervisor.
cloud-init. Include cloud-init if you want to inject SSH keys, user data, hostname, and network configuration at boot time.
Generalized image. Remove unique identifiers, machine-specific configs, and stale network rules before uploading.
Compatible filesystem. Use a single bootable partition or LVM layout that the cloud platform can boot.
Compressed format. Use QCOW2 with compression to reduce upload time and storage footprint.
Custom Images at a Glance
Upload and Deploy Your Own Images
Custom images are stored in your project and billed hourly by the gigabyte. See the Extras section of the pricing page for current image storage rates, and read the documentation for the full upload and conversion workflow.
Related Capabilities
Cloud Instances
The compute that runs your custom images. KVM virtual servers on OpenStack, starting at $4/mo.
Explore Cloud InstancesCloud-Init
Customize instance configuration at boot time with user data, SSH keys, and network settings.
Read the Cloud-Init GuideVirtual Private Cloud
A complete VPC with instances, networks, security groups, and full OpenStack API access.
Explore Cloud Hosting