Linux VM Templates in Proxmox on EASY MODE using Prebuilt Cloud Init Images! Proxmox Quick Tips

Have you ever wanted a nice, easy way to create new VMs to play with in Proxmox using your favorite base distro, without doing a lot of work to configure basic settings like your account, networking, hostname, etc?

Cloud-Init can do all of that and more, but it's designed more for big cloud providers and not the easiest thing to setup. But, what if we could take a generic cloud image, and use it with Proxmox's built-in Cloud-Init automation, to provision easy bare VMs without having to build our own templates? That's what I've done, and I've written a script to automate downloading these templates on new Proxmox systems from the major distros which provide them (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora).

Of course, once cloud-init is installed and configured, there's no reason we can't clone a template, install software on it, and then clone the clone to have a newly-configured VM with more software installed. From here, you can build out your library of useful application templates for whatever you do regularly.

See the script on my blog:

My favorite private cloud distributions - Ubuntu and Debian
For Debian, you usually want generic or genericcloud (same as generic but with less drives for hardware, good for most virtual machines)

The script sets up the VMs to have a serial display instead of VGA, this is more convenient since you can copy and paste in the console window. In general, all of these templates will work with serial since OpenStack requires it, but they seem to work fine with VGA consoles too if you're into that.

Link to my Discord to chat about related topics:

Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction
00:40 - Manual Template Creation
04:39 - Scripted Template Creation
06:49 - Using Templates
10:06 - Conclusion

#proxmox #virtualization #cloud-init

[nbensa]

This is the kind of videos I like the most. Short (no "youtube shorts" please) and packed with a lot and accurate info. Thank you!!

[redeuxx_]

These are the best video tutorials. Concise and to the point. A lot of other people like to start off with ... "In the beginning ...".

[fevangelou]

Probably the most concise video on Proxmox cloud-init templates, with a handy bonus bash script to automate the process. Thank you for making this!

[kapott_]

Love this video. Doesn't dance around the subject, just 100% useful all around. Keep it up good sir!

[melaronvalkorith]

Seriously great content! Thank you for taking the time to create this. I will be recommending your videos whenever I talk to new people getting into this stuff.

[jjws]

Proxmox doesn't have such good accessible information like this, so definitely a good subject to cover!

[tedvanmatje]

Nice one! This will give me something to play with over the weekend. Thanks, man!🖖

[ikerstges]

great stuff again! certainly quite some tips which make server management much easier! cloutinit is surely something I need to look into more thoroughly! thanks for the goodies! 👍

[Darkk]

Way cool! Love using scripts to make things easier with reproducible results. Love how QEMU/KVM/ProxMox constantly improves over time.

[blevenzon]

Woohoo so fun. Cloud init is the best thing since sliced bread. And now I finally know how to say Apalrd

[mpuertac]

Great stuff man! Helped me to save a lot of time creating new vms.

[chrisumali]

Thanks for the demo and info, this is awesome. Have a great day

[SyberPrepper]

Great video. Powerful way to always be creating new VMs. Thanks.

[Trains-With-Shane]

Finally went through and started working on my template. A note which may help some users. I'm on a slightly older version of Proxmox on my main host, 7.1-7, so I had to use "qm importdisk" rather than "qm disk import" when adding the img to the VM. I really need to upgrade to 7.3

[jettachamp]

good quick tips. a couple things though, before finalizing your template, it's good practice to sterilize your machine id and also wipe any ssh_host keys as well as bash history before converting to template, otherwise that will carry over. you will want different machine ID's otherwise you can run into issues later down the road that are hard to diagnose

[light-master]

The Debian 11 release template isn't working for me, its not running the cloud init at boot. Ubutnu 23.04 does work though.

[MahdiYusuf]

I thought there were things you needed to clean up when you booted ubuntu instance creates machine specific data like machine-id and etc. Is that no longer a thing?

[fabianoslack]

8:40 "The purpose of this video is..."

Why after installing the bunch of software you didn't execute "cloudinit clean" ? This will rerun cloudinit and reapply values from proxmox. Do it make sense?

[hodjaev]

Hello, thanks for the guide. Could you please tell how to get super user privileges for a regular user in alpine cloud image that you use

[pixelatedude]

I cloned the template, but after restarting Proxmox, the hostname of my Proxmox server changed to match the VM I had just created from the template, and the Proxmox UI failed to start. I had to revert the Proxmox hostname back to its original name and then execute `pmxcfs` to get the UI running again. How could this happen? Has anyone else encountered a similar issue?