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Hi Akira,

Cloudbase-Init supports ConfigDrive v2 metadata provided as either:

- ISO in cdrom drive (any version of Windows starting with XP / 2003)
- ISO in raw HDD (starting with Windows 8 / Windows 2012)

As you correctly pointed out, Windows does not directly support mounting raw disks (unpartitioned), so the latter is achieved by
extracting the content of the HDD in an ISO file and mount it as a loopback drive.

Nova defaults to ISO and supports VFAT for legacy reasons only. Quoting from [1]:

“For legacy reasons, you can configure the configuration drive to use VFAT format instead of ISO 9660. It is unlikely that you would require VFAT 
format because ISO 9660 is widely supported across operating systems. However, to use the VFAT format, add the following line to 
the /etc/nova/nova.conf file:

config_drive_format=vfat"

Due to this consideration, we didn't see any particular reason for supporting also VFAT, but we can talk about it if you have specific scenarios where it’s worth.


Thanks,

Alessandro


[1] http://docs.openstack.org/user-guide/content/enable_config_drive.html


On 22 Feb 2014, at 18:29, Akira Yoshiyama <akirayoshiyama at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> Recently, I've tried to use HDD-style config-drive with Windows VM and
> Cloudbase-init, but It didn't work.
> I found 2 things below:
> 
> * HDD-style config-drive v2 of Nova uses a VFAT filesystem without
> partition (whole disk).
> * Windows Server 2012 doesn't recognize a filesystem without partition.
> 
> HDD-style config-drive is useful because cloud-init can delete all
> data on it for security.
> How can I resolve this problem? Does HDD-style config-drive need to
> change its format?
> 
> Thank you,
> Akira Yoshiyama
> 
> p.s. Cloudbase-init looks for an ISO image on HDD-style config-drive.
> 
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