Image properties

Images can have associated properties, which are key value pairs giving additional information about the image such as what operating system is in the image or which hypervisor type is best suited to run it.

Properties available

A full list of the OpenStack image properties is available in the OpenStack documentation although some options may not have been tested or configured in the infomaniak Openstack Public Cloud.

Property	Setting
hw_cpu_max_sockets	This allows to set the maximun number of sockets exposed to the operating system. This setting is really useful if the operating system only allows a fixed number of sockets due to licensing like Windows Desktops. For example if you set this value to 2 and you select a flavor with 4 vCPUs, the instance will have 2 sockets of 2 cores each.
hw_watchdog_action	hw_watchdog_action=reset will cause the VM to be rebooted if it does not regularly reset the watchdog timer. For more information see the chapter on availability techniques
	hw_watchdog_action=disabled will not enable the watchdog. This is the default
os	Which family of operating systems is this image running (LINUX,Windows)
os_version	The version of the operating system. LanDB 'Operating System Version' field will be updated with this value if defined.
os_distro	os_distro=Debian for example
os_distro_major	The major distribution release number. Thus for CentOS 8.3, this would be set to 8.
os_distro_minor	The minor distribution release number. Thus for CentOS 8.3, this would be set to 3.
architecture	The architecture needed to run the image. x86_64 is 64 bit - i686 is 32 bit
release_date	The date when the image was made available for production. This is in the format YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS. It is different from the updated_at field in the image which is updated when a new version is provided to the image service.

• Properties can be used to automatically select images based on criteria in scripts. For example

$ openstack image list --property os_distro=C --property os_distro_major=8 --property architecture=x86_64  --sort updated_at
+--------------------------------------+-------------------------------+--------+
| ID                                   | Name                          | Status |
+--------------------------------------+-------------------------------+--------+
| 997b2e1a-832d-4803-9b00-f57fd1052bde | C8 - x86_64 [2020-10-01]      | active |
| cef683c8-800f-46be-87d0-8a62911a64ad | C8 TEST - x86_64 [2020-11-02] | active |
+--------------------------------------+-------------------------------+--------+