GDC-supported VM images

This document provides information on GDC-provided and GDC-supported VM images, as well as instructions to view images in your Distributed Cloud deployment.

You can create a virtual machine (VM) using one of the Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) air-gapped-provided images, also referred to as golden images. You can also use a bring-your-own (BYO) custom VM image for instances where you must meet specific software requirements.

This document is for developers in platform administrator or application operator groups that create VMs and manage VM images in a Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) air-gapped environment. For more information, see Audiences for GDC air-gapped documentation.

Before you begin

Request IAM roles

Contact your Project IAM Admin to request the following roles on your project:

  • Project VirtualMachine Admin (project-vm-admin): create, modify, list, and delete VMs in the project namespace.

  • Project VirtualMachine Image Admin (project-vm-image-admin): create, list, and delete custom VM images in the project namespace.

All VM roles must bind to the namespace of the project where the VM resides. Follow the steps to verify your access.

GDC VM images

This section provides information about GDC-supported operating systems.

GDC-provided golden images

Before you create a VM using a GDC-provided golden image, review the list of available images. Refer to the instructions in View a list of available GDC-provided images.

BYO images

You can also use your own custom images to create VM instances. This is useful when you have specific operating system or software configurations that aren't compatible with GDC-provided golden images. Follow the steps in Create custom images to create and list BYO images.

GDC-supported operating systems

This section details the operating systems available for use with Distributed Cloud VM instances.

Linux OS

Distributed Cloud supports the following Linux OS images:

OS Golden Image Importable
Ubuntu 20.04 Yes Yes
Ubuntu 22.04 Yes Yes
Ubuntu 24.04 Yes Yes
RHEL 8 No Yes
Rocky 8 Yes No
SUSE CHost 15.5 No Yes

You can only import Linux images from bootable disks. To boot your virtual disks in Distributed Cloud, the disks must run one of the GDC-supported operating systems.

Windows OS

Distributed Cloud supports the following Windows OS images:

OS Golden Image Importable
Windows Server 2019 Datacenter edition No Yes
Windows 10 No Yes

You can import Windows images from ISO installation media. Distributed Cloud installs Windows and creates a bootable image from the resulting disk.

Image import requires that the ISO does not prompt for input when booted with Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). To create a no-prompt ISO, start from an existing ISO file:

  1. Extract the ISO contents using the 7Zip archive management tool:

    7z x windows-installation.iso -oiso-unpack

  2. Create a new ISO from your extracted ISO using mkisofs, substituting in the EFI noprompt binary:

    mkisofs -b boot/etfsboot.com -no-emul-boot -c BOOT.CAT -iso-level 4 -J -l -D -N -joliet-long -relaxed-filenames -v -V "Custom" -udf -boot-info-table -eltorito-alt-boot -eltorito-boot efi/microsoft/boot/efisys_noprompt.bin -no-emul-boot -o ISO_NAME.iso -allow-limited-size iso-unpack

    Replace ISO_NAME with a name for the no-prompt ISO. For example, noprompt-install.