Working with images

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IBM® Power® Virtualization Center enables you to capture and import images that you can deploy as virtual machines.

An image consists of metadata and one or more binary images, one of which must be a bootable disk. To create a virtual machine in PowerVC, you must deploy an image.

There are several ways to obtain an image:
  • Go to the Hosts page, manage an existing virtual machine, then capture its image.
  • Import an image from your backing storage by following these instructions: Export and import images using CLI.
  • Create an image from existing volumes by following these instructions: Creating an image from existing volumes.
  • Create an image from ISO by following these instructions: Creating an image from ISO .
  • Setting the image visibility to public: Now the admin user of the ibm-default project can set the image visibility of PowerVC images from private to public. Setting the visibility of an image to public makes it available or shareable across the projects. Images shared by ibm-default project, can only be accessed by the admin of the shared projects. However, the volumes which are part of the image will not be visible to admins of other projects. Also, shared images are not accessible by non-admin users. For details, see Image sharing across projects.

The PowerVC user interface displays a maximum of 400 images. So, if you have more than 400 images, you can work with only a subset of them on the PowerVC user interface.