Templates help you easily set up instances, and can define the docker image, environment settings, and launch mode for your new instance. For comprehensive information for how our templates work on Vast, visit our template docs. This page will not go as deep into the system but serves as a walkthrough of the GUI within the Console.
As the name indicates, we recommend you select from our recommended templates when choosing a template. These are Vast-approved and more reliable.
If you click on the "Select" button on a given Template, it will set the given template as your current template and will take you to the Console's Search page.
If you click on the "Edit" button, the Template Editor will open for the given template. There you can edit settings and customize the template.
The template editor is a convenient GUI for controlling all your template's settings.
This section of a template allows you to set the docker image, tag of the image, and the Docker options.
You can currently set 3 types of docker create/run options in the GUI and CLI:
For more information, visit our Docker Execution Envvironment docs.
The launch mode allows you to define how you are going to connect to your instance. For our comprehensive documentation on launch mode options you can visit our launch mode docs.
For Windows users, read our Windows guide on how to use Putty tools to SSH into a Vast instance.
For both Jupyter and SSH launch modes, you can paste in a script that will run Bash commands after the machine starts. Add a semicolon ; at the end of each command.
Here you can set specific filters that will be applied on the Search page results.
With the slider you can set the Disk Space for your instance. It is important to estimate how much disk you will need and then to move the slider to the desired disk size. The default disk size for an instance is 10GB.
When the instance is created, the disk size is set and cannot be modified.
Providers charge for disk allocation even when the instance is stopped.
Templates using docker image tags from the docker.io/vastai/kvm
repository automatically launch VMs on machines that support VMs.
Add vms_enabled=true
to the Extra Filters field of the template to filter for machines that support VMs.
VM images must be specified using the fully qualified server/organization/repo:tag name.
Currently available VM images are (a recommended template is provided for each image):
Image (Recommended Template Link) | Available Launch Modes | Description | Provides | Use cases | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
docker.io/vastai/kvm:ubuntu_terminal (link) | direct_ssh | A Ubuntu 22.04 server VM. | CUDA, Docker | Serving Docker Compose applications; CUDA performance profiling | Will refuse to start without SSH pubkeys set; SSH pubkeys will not be able to be changed while instance is running. Env variables will be written to /etc/environment and may need to be sourced by onstart. Onstart script will need interpreter specified via shebangs. |
The table below lists some of the differences between VM and Docker based instances:
Feature | Docker | VM |
---|---|---|
Systemd/Docker/Snap | Not supported | Supported |
Cloud Copy | Supported | Not Implemented Yet |
ptrace | Not supported | Supported |
Disk Usage/Performance | Smaller initial disk footprint | Larger initial disk footprint |
You can't change existing instances - templates are recipes for new instances, so any changes to a template only effect new instances.
No, you can't change existing instances disk space.