In contrast to container images, VM disk images can be quite large (30GiB or more is common). It is important to consider the costs of transferring large amounts of data when planning workflows involving the creation of VMs (especially when scaling up the number of VMs). The efficiency of an image import depends on the format of the file and also the transfer method used. The most efficient workflow, for two reasons, is to host a gzip-compressed raw image on a server and import via HTTP. Compression avoids transferring zeros present in the free space of the image, and CDI can stream the contents directly into the target PV without any intermediate conversion steps. In contrast, images imported from a container registry must be transferred, unarchived, and converted prior to being usable. These additional steps increase the amount of data transferred between a node and the remote storage.