Image mode for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) streamlines your operating system deployment, management, and updates, by leveraging the power of bootable containers (bootc). To get started with this technology, and to get hands-on experience with this new deployment method, you can build a bootable image with Red Hat image builder.
Red Hat image builder is a tool that allows you to assemble customized RHEL images optimized for your specific target platforms. It supports you in standardizing and streamlining your deployments by applying customizations at build time. You can build a bootable RHEL image with RHEL image builder locally on a RHEL 9 or RHEL 10 host, or with the hosted Red Hat image builder service on the Hybrid Cloud Console.
The hosted Red Hat image builder service on Hybrid Cloud Console provides advantages for users just getting started with image mode for RHEL, including:
- Point-and-click wizard for defining and building your first bootable image
- Storing of image blueprints
- Building and downloading images without maintaining a build host yourself
- Accessing RHEL bootc base images that are optimized for for virtualization and public clouds
- No additional authenticating and downloading images from a container registry
Create an image blueprint and build a bootable image
An image blueprint is the configuration file that the image builder service uses to create the image artifact. The image blueprint includes basic metadata, definitions of package content, system customizations, and first boot scripts.
To get started, visit the Image builder page on Hybrid Cloud Console and click the Create image blueprint button to launch the image blueprint creation wizard. Provide a name and description for your blueprint, then select Image mode to see the available customizations (as in Figure 1).
You can build an image optimized for the public cloud, or to run on a virtualization platform like libvirt or Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. Select your target environment (Figure 2) and then continue to additional customizations.
With package mode for RHEL, you can customize your image blueprints with packages, security settings, and many system configurations. With image mode for RHEL, most of the configuration is in the container image, so the customizations in the image blueprint wizard are limited to users, groups, and filesystem partitioning. At a minimum, you need to create a user so that you can log into any systems you deploy from this image.
Proceed to the review step to confirm your choices and click Create blueprint and build image(s) to build your bootable RHEL image (Figure 3).
Deploy and manage your bootable image
After your bootable RHEL image builds, you can download it and deploy a system on your target environment. The result is a basic RHEL system without a workload, but all of the structures in place for you to learn how image-based management works. Read more about connecting and managing an image mode for RHEL system with Red Hat Lightspeed (formerly Red Hat Insights).
To get the full value of image mode for RHEL and the immutability and consistency that comes with image-based management, build a custom bootc container image, push that image to a container registry and switch your basic RHEL system to pull from this new image. All of the customizations that you configured with image builder, like users, groups, and filesystem layouts, will remain. Learn more about image mode for RHEL.
Get started today
Go to the Red Hat image builder in the Hybrid Cloud Console to build your customized bootable image for RHEL, and then deploy your image locally or to the public cloud to get started with image mode for RHEL.
For more information on Red Hat image builder, check out the image builder overview and list of latest blog posts at redhat.com/image-builder.
For a step-by-step guide, try our image mode learning path.
