What is Stored in a Template?
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I'm puzzled by templates. I had the impression that it was like a form for a new VM, but with some stuff already filled in. It seems, in fact, that there's much more happening in the background.
If I create a VM based on a 32 bit Windows template, it looks the same as a VM based on a Windows 64 tamplate. So, what's the difference? If I wanted to specifically create a 64 bit machine or a 32 bit machine, how would I actually achieve that?
Many of the people who have regularly listened to me whining over the last few weeks will understand that my endgame is to find the configuration which makes the Home Assistant OS VMDK (https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/linux) work for me.
Hints, tips, suggestions, moderate racial abuse all accepted gleefully.
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"Default templates" (ie provided with XCP-ng) could be seen as "BIOS/UEFI config" for your VMs. It doesn't store any disk info, but some Xen parameters (like the virt mode, PV vs HVM, or some "magic" parameters to be more compatible with Windows or Linux, UEFI or BIOS mode, and so on).
They also contains "recommendations" for disks and sizing.
That's pretty much it.
If you want to compare templates, you can use
xe template-param-list uuid=<TEMPLATE UUID>between multiple templates. -
@olivierlambert Pretty much nothing i should be farting around with then!
So, how do I dictate if a machine is 32 or 64 bit?
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I don't remember the diff, just display both 32 or 64 bits templates to see if you can spot a diff. I suppose it might be something specific for Windows. I don't see why it would be a different for Linux VMs.
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I can't see any difference. As I understand it the OS is written for either 32 or 64 bit hardware. Because (in the case of Home Assistant) I have a VDHK targetted at 64 bit hardware, how do I tell an XCP-ng VM to BE 64-bit hardware?
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So I did a diff for Windows 10 32 vs 64 bits. Main diff are:
32 vs 64:
- BIOS vs UEFI
- 2GiB vs 4GIB RAM preconfigured, max reco is 4GiB is 32bits
- secureboot off vs on
So basically, nothing fancy.
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@olivierlambert You inadvertently solved this one, too, n parallel with @tony .
So, basically, as suspected, a template is nothing more than populating stuff that's in the basic and advanced webforms on Orchestra, anyway.
