Base
Hardened build
minimal ports, security patches applied at build time
CentOS 7.8 LVM
Azure
Operating Systems
CentOS Linux 7.8.2003 on an LVM root, so storage grows without repartitioning
Overview
CentOS Linux is a free, open source community rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, binary compatible with RHEL. This image is CentOS Linux 7.8.2003, the point release that corresponds to RHEL 7.8, and it stays there: the package repositories are pinned to the frozen 7.8.2003 vault, so updating the machine does not quietly walk it onto a later point release.
It is also cut with an LVM disk layout. The root filesystem lives on a logical volume inside a volume group rather than on a fixed raw partition, with the boot partition deliberately left plain because the bootloader reads the kernel before the volume manager is available. That means you can extend root onto a larger disk, pool a brand new disk under the same filesystem and reshape storage on a running machine with standard tooling, instead of being locked to the size and shape the image shipped with. It is the whole difference from the standard CentOS 7.8 image, which ships a plain single partition root.
CentOS Linux 7 reached end of life on 30 June 2024 and receives no further upstream security updates, so this image is patched only to the last packages that exist for 7.8.2003 and is provided for legacy migration workloads. Plan a migration to a supported distribution for anything that must stay secure.
Why the cloudimg image
cloudimg builds this point release from the vault install tree rather than picking a dated cloud image, so the release the machine reports is a fact of how it was made, and builds the LVM layout from scratch too, because CentOS never published an LVM cloud image for any CentOS 7 release. Every package the 7.8 vault ever published is applied, the root volume is checked to really be a logical volume, and the online extension is proven on a fresh machine before the image is published, not just described. The repositories ship already repointed at the 7.8.2003 vault, so package management keeps working after the original mirrors were retired and the machine stays on the release you bought. There is no baked in credential: access is by the SSH key you choose at launch, password authentication is off and the root account is locked, so no two instances share a secret. SELinux ships enforcing, the only port reachable off the machine is SSH, the Azure guest agent is present so it provisions cleanly, and the image comes with a paired deploy guide and 24/7 support while you migrate.
Common uses
- Lift and shift of an estate whose machines already use an LVM root, so the storage layout matches
- Running software whose support statement names CentOS or RHEL 7.8 specifically
- Workloads that need the root volume grown or spread across extra disks without rebuilding the machine
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