Templates & Cloud Images

ProxCenter simplifies VM provisioning by managing cloud images and VM templates. Download official cloud images from Linux distributions, convert them into Proxmox templates, and deploy new VMs from those templates with cloud-init configuration.

Overview

Instead of manually downloading cloud images, uploading them to Proxmox storage, and configuring template VMs by hand, ProxCenter provides a streamlined workflow:

1. Browse a catalog of available cloud images
2. Download the image to your Proxmox storage
3. Create a template VM with the appropriate settings
4. Deploy new VMs from the template with cloud-init customization

Cloud Image Catalog

ProxCenter maintains a catalog of cloud images from popular distributions:

• Ubuntu -- Server cloud images (22.04 LTS, 24.04 LTS, etc.)
• Debian -- Generic cloud images
• Rocky Linux / AlmaLinux -- RHEL-compatible cloud images
• Fedora -- Cloud base images

The catalog shows the image name, version, architecture, format, and size. Images are downloaded directly from the distribution's official mirrors.

The Catalog Updates Itself

The catalog shipped with the release is a starting point, not the whole story: a distribution that publishes a new point release, or repoints a URL, used to leave ProxCenter pointing at a file that had started answering 404, and deploying that distribution failed outright.

ProxCenter now fetches a remote catalog and refreshes it daily. The Image Catalog tab states what it is serving, Catalog from date, with a per-image Image from date and when each was last checked, and Check for updates runs the refresh on demand, reporting either that the catalog is up to date or how many entries were added, changed and removed.

Two degraded states are named rather than hidden: when the remote catalog cannot be fetched at all, the catalog embedded in the release is served and says so; when a later refresh fails, the catalog fetched previously keeps being served and says so.

The dates are real build dates. Most distributions publish a rolling alias rather than a versioned URL, so ProxCenter probes the mirrors once a day and records the Last-Modified of the download URL, which fifteen of the sixteen mirrors answer, plus the exact point release when the vendor names it in its checksum manifest. Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux do; Debian and Ubuntu publish none, and their images are dated by the mirror alone.

A superseded version stays in the catalog rather than being removed, because removing an entry would break every blueprint referring to it.

Downloading Images

Select an image from the catalog and choose the target Proxmox node and storage. ProxCenter downloads the image and stores it in the ISO/template storage. Progress is shown in real time.

tip

Download images to a shared storage (NFS, Ceph, etc.) to make them available across all nodes in a cluster without downloading multiple copies.

Creating Templates

After downloading a cloud image, you can create a Proxmox VM template from it:

1. Select the downloaded image
2. Configure the template settings:
   • CPU -- Number of cores and CPU type
   • Memory -- RAM allocation
   • Disk -- Resize the cloud image disk if needed
   • Network -- Bridge and VLAN configuration
   • Cloud-Init -- Default user, SSH keys, DNS settings
3. ProxCenter creates the VM, imports the cloud image as the boot disk, enables cloud-init, and converts it to a template

Deploying from Templates

To deploy a new VM from a template:

1. Select the template
2. Choose the target node (can be different from where the template lives if using shared storage)
3. Configure instance-specific settings:
   • Hostname
   • IP address (static or DHCP)
   • SSH public keys
   • User and password
4. ProxCenter clones the template and applies the cloud-init configuration

The new VM is ready to start immediately after cloning.

Managing Templates

The Templates page lists all VM templates across your connected Proxmox instances. For each template, you can see:

• Which node and storage it resides on
• The base OS and image version
• How many VMs have been deployed from it
• When it was last updated

Container Templates

When deploying LXC containers, the template picker lists templates from any node that hosts the selected storage, not only the currently selected node. This is useful when template storage is shared across a cluster.

Tenant deployments still respect vDC storage and network boundaries.

Enterprise Feature

The Templates & Cloud Images feature is available in the Enterprise edition.

Permissions

Permission	Description
vm.create	Required to create templates and deploy VMs
storage.write	Required to download and store cloud images