Overview ^^^^^^^^ snf-image-creator is a simple command-line tool for creating OS images. The original media the image is created from, can be a block device, a regular file that represents a hard disk or the host system itself. Snapshotting ============ snf-image-creator works on snapshots. Any changes made by the program do not affect the original media. Image Preparation ================= During the image creation, a number of system preparation operations are applied on the media snapshot. Some of those are OS specific. snf-image-creator will use heuristics to detect the OS and determine which operations to apply. Those operations will: * Shrink the image * Clear out sensitive user data (passwords, ssh keys, history files, etc.) * Prepare the guest OS for being deployed on a virtual environment (change device names, remove persistent net rules, etc.) Creation ======== The program can either dump the image file locally or use `./kamaki `_ to directly upload and register it on a `Synnefo `_ deployment. Image Format ============ The extracted images are in diskdump format. This is the recommended format for `snf-image `_, the Ganeti OS Definition used by `Synnefo `_.