Templates and images

Built-in templates, the marketplace, and creating your own.

A template is a saved set of VM properties — CPU, memory, disk size, OS type and variant — so that creating a standard guest is one choice rather than twenty.

Built-in templates

Every deployment ships with templates for common guests:

Template OS variant vCPUs Memory Disk
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS ubuntu22.04 2 2048 MB 20 GB
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS ubuntu24.04 2 2048 MB 20 GB
Debian 12 debian12 2 2048 MB 20 GB
CentOS Stream 9 centos-stream9 2 2048 MB 20 GB
Windows Server 2022 win2k22 4 8192 MB 60 GB
Windows 11 win11 4 8192 MB 60 GB

These are shapes, not installed systems. Creating from one gives you a correctly configured empty VM; you still install the guest from an ISO.

Why the OS variant matters

The OS type and variant are not labels. They decide what virtual hardware the guest is given — which devices, which clock source, which defaults the hypervisor picks. A Windows guest built with a Linux variant works badly in ways that are hard to attribute later.

Pick the variant that matches what you are actually installing.

The marketplace

The marketplace lists templates published by Velarion that the deployment can fetch, rather than the ones already local. It is served from the software repository your deployment is pointed at.

An air-gapped site has no marketplace. Templates there are the built-in set plus whatever you define yourself. See Air-gapped sites.

Creating your own

VMs → Templates → Create. Give it a name, description, OS type and variant, and the default CPU, memory and disk size.

Define templates for the shapes your organisation actually uses — “standard application server”, “database node” — so that the decision about how big things are is made once, in one place, rather than by whoever is creating the VM that afternoon.

Guest tools

The platform can mount a guest tools ISO into a running VM from its console screen, and eject it again. Install the tools inside the guest for:

  • clean shutdown when the platform asks for one, rather than the equivalent of holding the power button,
  • the guest reporting its IP addresses and filesystem state back,
  • quiesced snapshots — see Snapshots.

Note — Without guest tools, a “graceful shutdown” depends on the guest responding to an ACPI power button event. Most Linux guests do. A Windows guest sitting at a login screen may not, and the platform will eventually force-stop it.

Operating system images

Distinct from templates: images are installable media and disk images the deployment keeps, and they are synced from the software repository. Templates say what shape a VM is; images and ISOs are what you install into it.

See The ISO library.