Hello! After digging through the source code, I'd answer my own question: image disk_format and container_format are (A) the formats of the image file that is passed in. Reasoning: Glance's so called flows use those parameters as input like ovf_process.py [1]: if image.container_format == 'ova': When there is a conversion done in the flow, the target format is the one from the configuration (like [2]): target_format = CONF.image_conversion.output_format After a possible conversion, the new disk and container formats are set (e.g. [3]): image.disk_format = target_format image.container_format = 'bare' (At some points instead of using the disk and container format parameters, a call to 'qemu-img info' is done to extract those information from the image - like in [4]: stdout, stderr = putils.trycmd("qemu-img", "info", "--output=json", ... ... metadata = json.loads(stdout) source_format = metadata.get('format') ) So it looks that the idea is, that the disk_format and container_format should always reflect the current format of the image. Can anybody please confirm / comment? Kind regards Andre [1] https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/glance/tree/glance/async_/flows/ovf... [2] https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/glance/tree/glance/async_/flows/plu... [3] https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/glance/tree/glance/async_/flows/plu... [4] https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/glance/tree/glance/async_/flows/plu... On 12/18/18 11:07 AM, Andre Florath wrote:
Hello!
I do not completely understand the parameters 'container_format' and 'disk_format' as described in [1]. The documentation always uses 'the format' but IMHO there might be two formats involved.
Are those formats either
(A) the formats of the image file that is passed in.
Like (from the official documentation [2])
$ openstack image create --disk-format qcow2 --container-format bare \ --public --file ./centos63.qcow2 centos63-image
qcow2 / bare are the formats of the passed in image.
or
(B) the formats that are used internally to store the image
Like
$ openstack image create --disk-format vmdk --container-format ova \ --public --file ./centos63.qcow2 centos63-image
vmdk / ova are formats that are used internally in OpenStack glance to store the image. In this case there must be an auto-detection of the image file format that is passed in and an automatic conversion into the new format.
Kind regards
Andre
[1] https://developer.openstack.org/api-ref/image/v2/index.html?expanded=create-... [2] https://docs.openstack.org/glance/pike/admin/manage-images.html