Cleaning Up Containers

The first-level quota assigned to this or that Container essentially shows how much space may be occupied by the Container private files, i.e. not by the OS or common applications files. The real OS and application files reside in the /vz/template directory on the server and practically do not add up to the Container quota (except for the symlinks to them located inside the Container and occupying insignificant space).

However, there are situations when one and the same application or application update is installed not as a template, but separately inside each and every Container. A good example of this is the CPanel application with its robust auto-update features. If a certain version of CPanel is installed in a number of Containers, and then an update is released, CPanel automatically updates itself in all these Containers, thus creating a vast amount of identical files (not symlinks already) throughout the Containers. These files tell dramatically on the Container quotas, which may be avoided by putting all the identical files to the server template area and creating symlinks instead of real files inside the affected Containers.

The problem like the one described above can be solved in two ways:

1. A special subarea is created inside the server template area - /vz/template/vc - for housing the files identical among multiple Containers with the help of the vzcache utility.
2. If the application or application update installed directly into one or more Containers has a corresponding application template or template update installed on the server, the real files inside the Containers are replaced with symlinks to the template files on the server with the help of the vzpkg link utility. This utility is used to create symlinks to application EZ templates.