You should see the following welcome screen:Ĭlick on New to begin creating your Ubuntu virtual machine. Once you’ve installed VirtualBox, open the application. In this guide, we’ll be using an OSX system, so we’ll download and install VirtualBox using the provided DMG. Follow the appropriate link in the VirtualBox 5.2.20 platform packages section depending on your host operating system. To begin, download and install VirtualBox from the downloads page. By default, VirtualBox uses a GUI, which we’ll use to create the VDI image in this guide. The tool we’ll use to convert the ISO-format image in this guide is VirtualBox, a free and open-source virtualizer for x86 hardware. Step 1 - Installing VirtualBox and Creating a Virtual Machine Once you have these prerequisites available to you, you’re ready to begin with this guide. If you’re adapting these steps for another distribution’s ISO and your image does not have cloud-init installed and configured, you must install and configure it manually after installing the OS.
Your image must have cloud-init 0.7.7, cloudbase-init, coreos-cloudinit, iginition, or bsd-cloudinit installed (Ubuntu 18.04 Server comes with cloud-init installed).Your image must support the ext3 or ext4 filesystems.The ubuntu-18.04.1-live-server-amd64.iso image meets the two requirements listed in the Custom Images Image Requirements: The GUI menu options should be similar across operating systems, but may not be identical.Īn ISO-format Ubuntu 18.04 Server OS image. To learn more about supported systems, consult the VirtualBox Manual.
In this tutorial we’ll use a Mac OS X local machine, but you can use any system supported by VirtualBox.
Prerequisitesīefore you begin, you’ll need the following available to you: The steps in this guide can be adapted to work with your preferred distribution’s ISO images.
In this tutorial, we’ll demonstrate how to use the free and open-source VirtualBox virtualization tool to create a DigitalOcean-compatible VDI image (VirtualBox Disk Image) from an Ubuntu 18.04 ISO.
Unfortunately, ISO images aren’t currently supported by the upload tool, although support is planned for the end of 2018. ISO images are frequently provided by Linux distributions as a convenient method for installing Linux. ISO is another popular image format which you may want to use with Custom Images. DigitalOcean’s Custom Images feature allows you to bring your virtual disk images from an on-premise environment or another cloud platform to DigitalOcean and use them to start DigitalOcean Droplets.Īs described in the Custom Images documentation, the following image types are supported natively by the Custom Images upload tool: