Bring Your Own Image (BYOI) / Bring Your Own Linux (BYOLinux), a comparison sheet
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03.02.2026 
Cloud / Dedicated Server (bare metal)
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:
- OS is not part of the OVHcloud catalog,
- Specific OS build version,
- OS with specific kernel version.
There are two different services that you can use for installing a custom OS on a dedicated server:
- Bring Your Own Image (BYOI),
- Bring Your Own Linux (BYOLinux).
This page is about breaking down the feature differences between the Bring Your Own Image and the Bring Your Own Linux services.
Features
| 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.
Go further
Bring Your Own Linux (BYOLinux)
OVHcloud API & OS installation
Join our user community on https://community.ovh.com/en/.
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Bring Your Own Image (BYOI)
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