Skip to main content
When you create a boot disk for a virtual machine, you need to choose an image for the disk. Compute supports two types of boot disk images:
  • Public images are provided and supported by the platform by default.
  • Custom images are images that you create yourself with customized software and architecture.
Nebius AI Cloud provides public boot disk images for GPU and non-GPU VMs.

​
Compatibility types

The image that you choose for a VM must be compatible with the VM’s platform. There are different types of compatibility:
  • Recommended images ensure stable VM performance.
  • Alternative images are compatible with the platform but do not guarantee stable performance.

​
Image family

Each image has a family. When you use the Nebius AI Cloud CLI or the provider for Terraform to create a boot disk, you need to specify its family. For example, the image Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for NVIDIA® GPUs (CUDA® 13) has the family ubuntu24.04-cuda13.0.

​
How to get a list of available public images

To get a list of public boot disk images available in a region, run:
The command returns the public images available in the specified region, including image families and other metadata. To determine which VM platforms are compatible with a public image, check the following parameters in the output:
  • recommended_platforms: Platforms for which the image is recommended.
  • unsupported_platforms: Platforms for which the image is not supported (with reasons, if available).
Availability of images and their compatibility with platforms differ by region.

​
Images for GPU VMs

For VMs with GPUs, create boot disks from the following images:
  • Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for NVIDIA® GPUs (CUDA® 12), ubuntu24.04-cuda12
  • Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for NVIDIA® GPUs (CUDA® 13), ubuntu24.04-cuda13.0
The ubuntu22.04-cuda12 image family is deprecated. Existing disks created from images in this family remain available, but creating new disks from this image family isn’t supported. Migrate to newer images.
The following boot disk images are compatible with GPU VMs:
The 1gpu-20vcpu-224gb preset for NVIDIA® B200 platforms (gpu-b200-sxm and gpu-b200-sxm-a) requires driver version 580.x or newer. Earlier driver versions are not supported.

​
GPU drivers and other components

The boot disk images for VMs with GPUs include the following components:
Componentubuntu24.04-cuda12ubuntu24.04-cuda13.0
Drivers presetcuda12.8cuda13.0
CUDA Toolkit12.8 (release notes)13.0 (release notes)
NVIDIA Data Center GPU Driver570.x580.x
Linux kernel6.11, NVIDIA HWE6.11, NVIDIA HWE
Networking packageNVIDIA DOCA 2.9.2 (release notes)NVIDIA DOCA 3.1.0 (release notes)
Other components

​
Images for non-GPU VMs

For VMs without GPUs, create boot disks from the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, ubuntu24.04-driverless image without GPU drivers and components. The images without drivers are also compatible with GPU VMs, but you need to install the drivers and components manually. We recommend using the dedicated images for GPU VMs. The following boot disk images are compatible with non-GPU VMs:
The ubuntu22.04-driverless image family is deprecated. Existing disks created from images in this family remain available, but creating new disks from this image family isn’t supported. Migrate to newer images.

​
Security updates

Automatic security updates are disabled by default. We recommend that you check the compatibility of new library versions on a test VM, and then apply the updates manually to all running GPU nodes. If you do need automatic updates, you can enable them.
InfiniBand and InfiniBand Trade Association are registered trademarks of the InfiniBand Trade Association.