How To Download Proxmox LXC CT Templates To Ubuntu NFS Server

In our previous article, we created a central Ubuntu NFS Server that is providing our templates over the network. Each host is connected to the NFS Server to install the required Operating System. In this guide, we are going to download Proxmox Templates to our NFS Server. We are using two types of templates. LXC and ISO. We will look at making KVM templates for use on Proxmox in another article. Proxmox has LXC Templates ready-made. LXC templates are for CT or containers. These templates a lightweight and ideal for infrastructure like database servers.

When we connected our template server to Proxmox, Proxmox created a number of directories to store templates in. Our NFS server was mounted to /mnt/cluster-templates. In this directory, we can see two folders. Images and Templates. All Proxmox templates are located in the templates folder.

Download Proxmox LXC Templates

Inside the templates folder, you will see two more folders called ISO and CACHE. ISO files reside in the ISO folder and LXC templates reside in the cache folder. To add ISO files you can use wget to download them to this folder. For example, this command will download the Ubuntu 20.10 ISO to the ISO folder.

cd /mnt/cluster-templates/template/iso
wget https://releases.ubuntu.com/20.10/ubuntu-20.10-live-server-amd64.iso

To download container images you can use the host and the pveam command. Login as root to your Proxmox host and first update the cache

pveam update

Next, look at the available templates. You will get a list of templates you can download to your NFS server.

pveam available

mail            proxmox-mailgateway-6.4-standard_6.4-1_amd64.tar.gz
 system          alpine-3.11-default_20200425_amd64.tar.xz
 system          alpine-3.12-default_20200823_amd64.tar.xz
 system          archlinux-base_20201116-1_amd64.tar.gz
 system          centos-7-default_20190926_amd64.tar.xz
 system          centos-8-default_20201210_amd64.tar.xz
 system          debian-10-standard_10.7-1_amd64.tar.gz
 system          debian-9.0-standard_9.7-1_amd64.tar.gz
 system          devuan-3.0-standard_3.0_amd64.tar.gz
 system          fedora-32-default_20200430_amd64.tar.xz
 system          fedora-33-default_20201115_amd64.tar.xz
 system          gentoo-current-default_20200310_amd64.tar.xz
 system          opensuse-15.2-default_20200824_amd64.tar.xz
 system          ubuntu-16.04-standard_16.04.5-1_amd64.tar.gz
 system          ubuntu-18.04-standard_18.04.1-1_amd64.tar.gz
 system          ubuntu-20.04-standard_20.04-1_amd64.tar.gz
 system          ubuntu-20.10-standard_20.10-1_amd64.tar.gz
 turnkeylinux    debian-10-turnkey-ansible_16.1-1_amd64.tar.gz
 turnkeylinux    debian-10-turnkey-asp-net-core_16.1-1_amd64.tar.gz
 turnkeylinux    debian-10-turnkey-avideo_16.1-1_amd64.tar.gz

Let’s say we want to download the Debian 9 template to our templates server. We would switch the local flag for the template servers name. In our setup, we called our templates server Cluster-Templates.

pveam download <strong>Cluster-Templates</strong> debian-9.0-standard_9.7-1_amd64.tar.gz

If you are not sure of the name you used when adding your NFS server to Proxmox, navigate to Datacenter > Storage and you will see the NFS Server.

You can just repeat the process to download all of the Proxmox CT templates that you require. If you want the CT templates locally just switch the download location to local.