Parallels

Resolution

EZ templates allow you to create VEs based on major Linux distributions and keep them up-to-date by installing new packages as soon as they are available at vendors' sites.

EZ templates demonstrate a number of distinctive features:

• Standard templates carry all the necessary package files inside themselves whereas EZ templates have only information about the necessary packages (metadata) to be included in the corresponding EZ template. The packages themselves are downloaded from a central repository. Detailed information on what the package repositories are and how to manage them is provided in the Managing Repositories for RPM Packages section (page 98).

• The EZ template meta data does not contain any RPM package version, but only its name. So, you always update any RPM package included in the EZ template to its latest versions available in the repository.

• The EZ template meta data can contain only the names of those RPM packages that you are going to make use of. The dependencies of the RPM packages are handled automatically; so, if the specified RPMs require other packages to be installed, these packages are also downloaded from the repository and installed on the Hardware Node.

• Standard templates have versions and updates (e.g. redhat-9 20021224) while EZ templates do not have them (e.g. redhat-as4-x86). Thus, you install the EZ template on the Hardware Node only once and, after that, only update the RPM packages inside the VE to which the corresponding EZ templates are applied.

• Any EZ template can have several sets of RPM packages included in it. By default, all EZ templates have the base RPM packages set; these are base EZ templates. However, you can create your own RPM packages sets called non-base EZ templates. In this case the name of the created RPM packages set should be appended to the EZ template name (e.g. redhatas4-x86-minimal).

EZ templates are explained in details in chapter 'Understanding EZ Templates' on pages 92-111 of Virtuozzo User's Guide (VzLinuxUG.pdf) shipped with Virtuozzo 3.0 distro.

It is worth saying that Virtuozzo 3.0 fully supports both EZ and standard templates.  EZ templates are located in eztemplates/ directory of Virtuozzo 3.0 distro.