Guest Image

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Discussion

A Guest Image is a Machine Image prepared to instantiate and operate as a guest system on a virtualization, cloud, or other host-managed platform.

The image includes the operating-system and configuration elements required to interact with the hosting environment, such as boot configuration, device support, network initialization, storage handling, management agents, and platform-specific integration.

A Guest Image may originate from a Base Image and may later receive security hardening, workload capabilities, or provider-specific conversion.

Within Crucible, a Guest Image represents an image state suitable for use as the foundation of a hosted virtual or cloud machine.

Definition

machine image prepared to instantiate and operate as a guest system on a virtualization, cloud, or other host-managed platform

Source

Generalized from virtualization, cloud computing, guest-operating-system, and machine-image engineering usage and specialized for the Crucible architecture and operational model.

Note

A Guest Image identifies the intended hosted execution role of the image. It does not by itself indicate that the image is hardened, compliant, workload-specific, or approved for production use.

A Guest Image may require conversion, metadata, or registration before use on a particular Deployment Platform.

Example

Crucible prepares a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 Machine Image with cloud-compatible boot, networking, storage, and management configuration. The resulting Guest Image can serve as the source for later hardening and capability layers.

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