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Overview

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This section describes how to create and manage Virtual Machines. You will find descriptions of how VMs are defined in Virtual Machine Templates, which are instantiated to become Virtual Machines, i.e. Virtual Machine Instances. There is also information on disk Images

Hypervisor Compatibility

These guides are compatible with all hypervisors.

Virtual Machine Templates

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In OpenNebula, VMs are defined with VM Templates. This section explains how to describe a Virtual Machine, and how users typically interact with the system.

OpenNebula administrators and users can register Virtual Machine definitions (VM Templates) in the system, to be instantiated later as Virtual Machine instances. These VM Templates can be instantiated several times and also shared with other users.

Defining a VM

A Virtual Machine Template, in basic terms, consists of:

Virtual Machine Instances

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This guide may be considered a continuation of the Virtual Machines Templates guide. Once a Template is instantiated to a Virtual Machine, there are a number of operations that can be performed using the onevm command.

Basic Virtual Machine Operations

Creating and Listing VMs

Note

Read the Creating Virtual Machines guide for more information on how to manage and instantiate VM templates.

Note

Read the complete reference for Virtual Machine templates.

Assuming we have a VM template registered called vm-example with ID 6, then we can instantiate the VM by issuing a:

Virtual Machine Images

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

An OpenNebula Image represents a VM disk. Images can have multiple formats (e.g., filesystem or block device) and can store OS installations, data filesystems, images, or kernels. In this guide you’ll learn about different Image types, and how to manage and use them.

In OpenNenbula there are two main places where VM disk images are stored:

Marketplaces, which are shared locations across multiple OpenNebula clouds. They can be public or for private use. Marketplaces store Marketplace Applications (or Appliances), that includes the application definition together with the disk images.
Datastores, which are the local storage areas of a cloud. They typically refer to storage clusters or hypervisor disks and are mainly devoted to store disk images.

Types and Persistency

OpenNebula uses four different Image types to represent VM disks. A VM can use multiple Image types simultaneously: