Bring Your Own Custom Image in Paravirtualized Mode for Improved Performance

We are excited to announce the availability of a new way to move and improve existing workloads with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. You can now import a range of new and legacy operating systems using paravirtualized hardware mode. VMs using paravirtualized devices provide much faster performance compared to running in emulated mode, with at least six times faster disk I/O performance.

To get started, you simply export VMs from your existing virtualization environment and import them directly to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as custom images. You can import images in either QCOW2 or VMDK format.

The following screenshot shows the Import Image dialog box, where you can choose to import your image in paravirtualized mode. Once the image is imported successfully, you can launch new VM instances with this image to run your workloads.

Paravirtualized mode is available on X5 and X7 VM Instances running Linux OS which include the kvm virtio drivers. Linux kernel versions 3.4 and higher include the drivers by default. This includes the following Linux OSs: Oracle Linux 6.9 and later, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 and later, CentOS 7.0 and later, and Ubuntu 14.04 and later. We recommend using emulated mode to import older Linux OS and Windows OS images.

If your image supports paravirtualized drivers, it is easy to convert your existing emulated mode instances into paravirtualized instances. You can create a custom image of your instance, then export it to object storage, and re-import it in paravirtualized mode.

Bring your own custom image in paravirtualized mode is offered in all regions at no extra cost. Now you have another way to bring existing workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, with improved performance!

Bringing existing OS images:

[NEW] Bring your own custom image to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure VMs using paravirtualized mode: Import existing Linux OS images using VMDK or QCOW2 formats and run in paravirtualized mode VMs for improved performance. For details, see Bring Your Own Custom Image for Paravirtualized Mode Virtual Machines.

Bring your own custom image to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure VMs using emulation mode: Import existing Linux OS images using VMDK or QCOW2 formats and run in emulation mode VMs. For details, see Bring Your Own Custom Image for Emulation Mode Virtual Machines.

Move an entire virtualized workload to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure by using your existing hypervisor, management tools, and processes. OS images or older OSs, such as Ubuntu 6.x, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.x, or CentOS 5.4, can use KVM on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure bare metal instances. For detailed instructions, see Bring Your Own KVM and Bring Your Own Nested KVM on VM Shapes.

Bring Your Own Oracle VM: For details, see Oracle VM on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

You can also building new OS images:

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Published OS Images: Oracle provides prebuilt images for Oracle Linux, Microsoft Windows, Ubuntu, and CentOS. For details, see the complete list of Oracle-provided images.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure bare metal and VM instances: You can also generate a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 image for bare metal and VM instances by using a Terraform template available from the Terraform provider.