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Support Custom ISO upload

Please support custom ISO upload so we can use operating systems not offered by Compute Engine. Such as modified/slimmed down Linux distros.

Will also let people customers upload Windows Desktop OS without Google having to figure out complicated licensing with MS.

132 votes
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T. Ulin shared this idea  ·   ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
under review  ·  AdminPaul Nash (Product Manager, GCE, Google) responded  · 

Thanks for you suggestion. ISO support is something we’re looking at, although importing a disk image for an OS that Google does not publish an image for is already possible, through the process of creating your own image 1. Note that existing ISO images cannot run without first being modified to include the necessary OS drivers to support GCE’s virtual hardware devices (at least disk and networking). It may not be the case that all Linux distributions can support those.

However: we would not implement this for the purpose of allowing customers to violate Microsoft licensing, because we cannot legitimately support scenarios that Microsoft has disallowed. There is currently no available option for anybody to run Microsoft Desktop OSs on any public multi-tenant cloud that we are aware. You have to use dedicated hardware.

1 https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/images/import-existing-image

13 comments

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  • Wild Hosting commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Need this very much , in addition to other thousand peoples which they don't have the time to add requests here !!!

  • John commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    vultr already has the option of uploading a ISO file, this feature is very important for me it was a real pain in the neck not having this feature and having to install freepbx on Cent OS and I still have issues with it, this could have saved me hours of troubleshooting

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    What about using custom images / iso that are virtual network appliances such as LogRhythm, AlienVault, etc.

  • AdminPaul Nash (Product Manager, GCE, Google) commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Thanks for your continued interest in this feature. As we've mentioned before, one of the reasons we maintain this UV forum is to get this kind of feedback. An important element of it is to help us prioritize the many features we could build for customers with our limited available engineering bandwidth (no matter how big, no software team ever has enough time for everything!). As I write this comment, this feature has a total of 15 votes here on this forum, whereas we are actively working on the items higher up the list that have hundreds of votes. We are always working to complete as many requests as we can, however I can't predict a timeline for this item, because it is rarely requested right now.

  • Rob Diamond commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Hi. Any progress here? Not seeing a way to easily deploy an pre-made OS ISO, such as an Asterisk PBX image.

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