Noob install went well but where can I find templates?

[almostobvious]

When I go to Compute/Add instance, the "Template/ISO" is empty - there is nothing in featured/community/my templates for either templates or ISOs.

I have exactly two templates which I can see in "Images/Templates" after a clean fresh install - Debian 5.0 and CentOS 5.5. In 2025, this seems a little off.

Isn't this supposed to have a whole gallery of templates? How can I get a good assortment of modern OS templates?

Many thanks in advance

[JoaoJandre]

Hi, @almostobvious

ACS's focus is on providing a cloud orchestration platform, not cloud templates. Furthermore I would advise you to not trust public templates (to use in production) for security reasons. You're supposed to build your owns based on ISOs. You can register ISOs on the GUI and then use them to create VMs. You can find more about creating templates on the docs: https://docs.cloudstack.apache.org/en/latest/adminguide/templates.html

[almostobvious]

Thanks Joao, appreciate the clarification. I sort of expected to see a rich set of OSs and appliances ready to go... it just seems like a lot of work every single user needs to do.

On another note, I already have a lot of isos on a volume I've added to cs storage. How can I use these images in-place without re-uploading them?

Thank

[JoaoJandre]

@almostobvious About using ISOs that you already have downloaded, there is currently no way to point ACS towards a ISO/Template that is already on storage so that it is used. ACS will have to download it someway.

What I would recommend in your case is to setup a simple apache2 server with your ISOs, and register them so that ACS downloads it. Downloading something from within your infra should not be too expensive.

A second option would be uploading them from the browser, but this will probably be slower.

[weizhouapache]

most OS providers build cloud images daily/weekly.
for testing purpose, you can register some cloud images from ubuntu, debian, rocky, almalinux, etc