Application Templates

Abstract

Application Templates (AT's) are commonly found when using Virtualization as a means to try out new software without having to perform a full manual install. Unfortunately, OpenVZ, as of yet, doesn't have any precreated AT's for people to try out, which might be attributed to the lack of documentation on how to create them. The primary goal of this howto is to give an overview of how an AT can be created for OpenVZ without too much trouble.

Introduction

There are two ways to create an AT: as a full VE template, or an interactive shell script/installer that installs the software into an existing VE. The second method is more advanced, and will be very specific to the individual applications, so is out of the scope of this document.

Step 1: The Base

Choose the base OS you'd like to use and find an existing VE template to use (or create your own). For this document, I'm using the CentOS 5 x86_64 template