Bring Your Own Image (BYOI) vs Bring Your Own Linux (BYOLinux) - Comparison for Dedicated Servers

Compare the Bring Your Own Image (BYOI) and Bring Your Own Linux (BYOLinux) services to choose the right deployment method for your dedicated server.

Objective

Although OVHcloud provides its customers with a wide range of Operating System (OS) for your dedicated servers, you might have good reasons to need to install a custom OS:

There are two different services that you can use for installing a custom OS on a dedicated server:

This page is about breaking down the feature differences between the Bring Your Own Image and the Bring Your Own Linux services.

Feature Name	Feature Description	BYOI	BYOLinux
Custom Image	Provide the download URL to a custom OS image	✅	✅
Custom Partitioning¹	Exploit OVHcloud partitioning API to configure partitions, software RAID, LVM, ZFS in your custom image at OS installation	❌	✅
Multiple-disks	OS installation on multiple disks²	❌	✅
Image Format	Image URL provided must redirect to a file format that is compatible	RAW, QCOW2	QCOW2
Hardware RAID²	Exploit OVHcloud API to configure your dedicated server's hardware raid controller at OS installation	✅	✅
Non-Linux-based OS	In addition to Linux-based-OS, use any OS: UNIX, Windows, FreeBSD etc.	✅	❌

¹ Your image must be built accordingly.
² Assuming you have compatible hardware.

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