OpenStack and KVM/QEMU support a cornucopia of image and disk formats. With so many options it can be difficult to understand all the various trade-offs of these formats.
We will explore some of the more common image formats and disk formats and their trade-offs. We will cover tips and tricks for converting image formats, and working with these images directly. Additionally we will dive into how nova, libvirt, and KVM interact with these formats when doing various operations such as snapshoting and image resizing. We will look at best practices for configuring the guest operating systems such as default login credentials, network configuration, and device/performance optimization. Finally we will look at how to pre-install tools to assist in configuring the OS at VM creation as well as how to interact with the metadata API.