Exporting a boot image

Before you begin

Before you export a boot image, complete the following prerequisites:

• You have a Power Virtual Server workspace with at least one custom boot image in your image catalog.
• You have an IBM Cloud Object Storage bucket to export the image to. For more information, see Create some buckets to store your data.
• You have generated HMAC credentials for your COS instance. For more information about generating HMAC credentials, see Using HMAC credentials.

Exporting a boot image by using the Power Virtual Server user interface

To export a boot image from your image catalog by using the Power Virtual Server user interface, complete the following steps:

1. Log in to the IBM Cloud catalog with your IBM credentials.

2. In the search box, type Power Virtual Server and click the Power Virtual Server tile.

3. Click Workspaces in the navigation panel. The Workspaces page with a list of existing workspaces is displayed.

4. Select the workspace that contains the boot image that you want to export. The Virtual server instances page of the selected workspace is displayed.

5. Click Boot images in the navigation panel.

6. Click the overflow menu for the boot image that you want to export and select Export. The Export boot image panel is displayed.

7. In the Export boot image panel, complete the following steps:

   1. From the Region dropdown list, select the region that contains your COS bucket.

   2. In the Bucket name field, enter the name of the bucket to which you want to export the image. If your image file must be stored in a subfolder within the bucket, specify the full path by using the bucketName/optional/folders format.

      To identify your bucket name, go to Navigation menu > Resource list > Storage and click your Cloud Object Storage instance name. Your buckets are listed on the Buckets tab.

   3. Copy the access_key_id value from your COS service credentials and paste it into the HMAC access key field.

      To find your service credentials, go to Navigation menu > Resource list > Storage and click your Cloud Object Storage instance name. Then go to Service credentials > View credentials.

   4. Copy the secret_access_key value from your COS service credentials and paste it into the HMAC secret access key field.

   5. Set Generate checksum file to On to generate a checksum file.

      The checksum file is created and placed in the IBM Cloud Object Storage bucket along with the exported image. The checksum file name is based on the name of the image file and uses the .sha256 file extension. After the export completes, run the shasum -a 256 command to verify the integrity of the exported image file.

   The maximum image size that you can export is 10 TB.

8. Click Export. The Export boot image dialog is displayed with the export operation details. Review the information and click Export to confirm.

The boot image export job is submitted. You can monitor the progress in the Status column on the Boot images page. For more details, see Viewing boot image export results.

Exporting a boot image by using the Power Virtual Server CLI

To export a boot image, use the ibmcloud pi image export command. To verify that the export completed successfully, use the ibmcloud pi image export-show command.

Exporting a boot image by using the Power Virtual Server API

To export a boot image to IBM Cloud Object Storage by using the API, use the Add image export job to the jobs queue method with the following required properties in the request body: accessKey and bucketName. Optionally, include region and secretKey. For more information, see Using HMAC credentials.

curl -X POST \
  https://us-east.power-iaas.cloud.ibm.com/pcloud/v2/cloud-instances/$CLOUD_INSTANCE_ID/images/$IMAGE_ID/export \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  -H "CRN: $CRN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "bucketName": "my-cos-bucket-name",
    "accessKey": "my-cos-access-key",
    "region": "us-east",
    "secretKey": "my-cos-secret-key"
  }'

Viewing boot image export results

After you start a boot image export, the Status column on the Boot images page shows the export progress. To view more details, click View details to open the Ongoing job status dialog. The dialog shows the following information:

• Job ID
• Operation type
• Input resource
• Creation time
• Steps completed

To view the boot image export job details by using the CLI, use the ibmcloud pi image export-show command.

To view the image export status by using the API, use the Get detail of last image export job method.

Related information

For information about importing custom boot images, see Importing a boot image.

For information about capturing and exporting virtual server instances, see Capturing and exporting a virtual server instance.