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Legacy Equinix Metal Images (deprecated)

In September of 2023, Equinix Metal™ is deprecating the legacy Metal Images and support.

The legacy Equinix Metal images that are still available in the packet-images public GitHub repository are outdated. You are encouraged to migrate your provisioning process to use the most recent cloud-based images, which are kept as close to upstream releases as possible. For more information on our operating system images, see our page on our Supported Operating Systems.

Starting on September 15, 2023, the packethost/packet-images repository will be archived. Starting on October 2, 2023, the packethost/packet-images repository will be made private, and you will no longer have access to the images in the repository.

Equinix Metal used to create operating system images built specifically for each Equinix Metal server type and containing customizations to the pre-installed packages. Starting at the end of 2021, we are moving towards using cloud images built by the operating system's maintainers.

You are encouraged to migrate to the newer cloud based images, but to ease the transition, the legacy Equinix Metal images are still available in the packet-images public Github repository. Please consider before using legacy images from the GitHub repository that they are frozen and will not receive updates. Also, Equinix Metal no longer supports building your own custom images based off our old images.

Legacy Images - Packages

Legacy Equinix Metal images included many packages that are not present on the the newer cloud images. As of January 2022, the OS images that are available to deploy through the Equinix Metal console and API will NOT include:

  • traceroute
  • cpufrequtils
  • dstat
  • iperf
  • jq
  • mg
  • mosh
  • mtr
  • netcat
  • nmap
  • ntpdate
  • shunit2
  • ssh
  • unzip
  • gnupg2

Deploying Legacy Images

You can deploy a legacy image from packethost/packet-images by specifying the repository and image tag in the User Data at the time of deployment. In the Equinix Metal console, select the operating system and version you're deploying (Ubuntu 18.04, CentOS 7, etc.) from the Select an Operating System section, then enter the legacy image information into the User Data field under Optional Settings.

#cloud-config
#image_repo=https://github.com/packethost/packet-images.git
#image_tag=<image-sha>

User Data for Deploying a Legacy Image in the Console

Here are some example image SHAs for Ubuntu:

ubuntu_18_04-2021-10-11-1633977888    1e1ec762dd8b13347a141bc69704a8443348fb18
ubuntu_20_04-2021-09-20-1632160881    c33f696cacbdac47dd40f2c7efd90b5122851aae
ubuntu_21_04-2021-09-20-1632160869    c8cd42fc82d582c0d800e3b6d469c3ae6d9e7c40

The legacy versions can be referenced by the operating system image version name when using the Equinix Metal CLI.

metal device create --hostname <your_hostname> --plan <server_slug> --metro <metro_slug> --operating-system <legacy_os_image_name> --project-id <your_project_id>

Here are some example image names for Ubuntu:

ubuntu_18_04-2021-10-11-1633977888
ubuntu_20_04-2021-09-20-1632160881
ubuntu_21_04-2021-09-20-1632160869

For example, to provision the most recent legacy image for Ubuntu 20.04 you can use the following operating system version name:

metal device create --hostname my-ubuntu-20_04-host --plan c3.medium.x86 --metro any --operating-system ubuntu_20_04-2021-09-20-1632160881 --project-id my-project-id

The legacy versions can be referenced by the operating system image version name when using the Equinix Metal API.

curl -X POST \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "X-Auth-Token: <API_TOKEN>" \
"https://api.equinix.com/metal/v1/projects/{id}/devices" \
-d '{
    "metro": "<metro_slug>",
    "plan": "<server_slug>",
    "operating_system": "<legacy_os_image_name>"
}'

Here are some example image names for Ubuntu:

ubuntu_18_04-2021-10-11-1633977888
ubuntu_20_04-2021-09-20-1632160881
ubuntu_21_04-2021-09-20-1632160869

For example, to provision the most recent legacy image for Ubuntu 20.04 you can use the following operating system version name:

curl -X POST \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "X-Auth-Token: <API_TOKEN>" \
"https://api.equinix.com/metal/v1/projects/{id}/devices" \
-d '{
    "metro": "sv",
    "plan": "c3.medium.x86",
    "operating_system": "ubuntu_20_04-2021-09-20-1632160881"
}'

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