Custom Images Glossary

Custom images are Linux and Unix-like images you import to DigitalOcean. You can create Droplets based custom images, which lets you migrate and scale your workloads without spending time recreating your environment from scratch.

This glossary defines the core concepts behind custom images to help build your mental model of how custom images work and understand what the documentation is referring to when it uses certain terminology.

DHCP

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is a network management protocol that automates the assignment of IP addresses.

Disk Image

Disk images are software copies of physical disks. Disk images save the data of a physical disk, like a hard drive, to one or more files.

ISO Image

An ISO image, or ISO file, is an exact copy of an optical disk, in a single file.

qcow2

qcow2 is a disk image file format.

Tag

Tags are keywords associated with resources which help with managing resource ownership and organize lookups and actions on resources.

VDI

A virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is a system of desktop virtualization that hosts desktop environments on a centralized server.

VMDK

A virtual machine disk (VMDK) file is a virtual file format (.vmdk) for containers of virtual hard disk drives.