GDC-supported VM images

You can create a virtual machine (VM) using one of the Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) air-gapped-provided images listed on this page. You can also bring-your-own (BYO) custom VM image to use instead. This document provides information on GDC-provided and GDC-supported VM images, as well as instructions to view this list in your Distributed Cloud deployment.

Before you begin

To get the permissions you need to list and use Google Distributed Cloud air-gapped VM golden images, ask your Project IAM Admin to grant you the Project VirtualMachine Admin (project-vm-admin) role in the namespace where the VM resides. Follow the steps to verify that you have the required permissions.

List VM images

This section provides information about GDC-supported operating systems.

List golden images

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

List 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 you must use. To create and list BYO images, refer to the instructions in Create custom images.

GDC-supported operating systems

This section details the operating systems Distributed Cloud VMs support.

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. Complete the following steps:

  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.