Images

Overview

SysEleven provides and maintains a set of images in the SysEleven Stack. As soon as vendors publish new images, we will verify their origin, test them and publish them automatically. This means that we only publish images that are correctly signed. We don't make any changes in vendor images, to keep checksums intact. That allows our customers to validate image origin if needed.

You can view and manage images both via the OpenStack API and CLI, as well as using the Dashboard (GUI).

If you need to maintain your own set of images, you can upload them yourself as well using the OpenStack API. It is possible to use tools like HashiCorp Packer to build your own images, for example with certain preinstalled software.

Available public images

Public image lifecycle

As soon as we upload a new version of an operating system image (recognizable by the current date in their name), we will change the visibility of the old image version:

• If you are using an old public image, the image will stay visible within the project that is using it until you stop using it
• If you are not using an old public image anymore, the image will become invisible for you after some time.
• If a public image becomes completely unused by all customers, we will remove it

Public image properties

Public images get certain properties that you can use for finding the latest images for example with Packer or Terraform.

We follow the SCS Image Metadata Standard
Here is an example for filtering the images by properties using HashiCorp Terraform's image data source:

data "openstack_images_image_v2" "ubuntu-focal" {
  most_recent = true
  properties = {
    os_version = "20.04"
    os_distro = "ubuntu"
  }
}

Known issues with public images

• The official Debian Buster OpenStack image may have a bug in the ifupdown configuration.
  After the initial boot, the eth0 interface will be configured with both DHCP and static cloud-init configuration. Since both will try to assign the same IP address to eth0, RTNETLINK answers: File exists errors will be produced, with the result that the networking.service systemd unit goes into error state. This will block the DHCP client from refreshing the lease after 24 hours.
  A solution is to remove the dynamic eth0 configuration from /etc/network/interfaces, or to remove the static configuration written by cloud-init from /etc/network/interfaces.d. After this change, a restart of the systemd-networkd systemd unit, or a restart of the virtual machine is required.

Uploading images

Image sources

If you prefer maintaining your own set of images, this table shows sources for commonly used images suitable for OpenStack:

How to upload images?

The "Upload Images" how-to guide explains how to upload images via CLI and GUI.