OpenStack Glance Image Service

Glance is the image catalog and delivery service for OpenStack. It stores, discovers, and serves virtual machine images that Nova uses to boot instances. Glance handles image metadata, format validation, access control, and backend storage abstraction -- it does not care where images are physically stored, only that they are retrievable.

Supported image formats: qcow2 (default, copy-on-write, thin provisioning), raw (direct disk image, fastest I/O), vmdk (VMware), vhd/vhdx (Hyper-V), iso (CD/DVD). Backend storage options: file (local filesystem, simplest), swift (OpenStack object storage), ceph (distributed storage via RBD), cinder (block storage as image backend).

Deploy

Kolla-Ansible Configuration

globals.yml settings:

# Backend storage (choose one)
glance_backend_file: "yes"              # Local filesystem (single-node, simplest)
# glance_backend_ceph: "yes"           # Ceph RBD (multi-node, production)
# glance_backend_swift: "yes"          # Swift object storage