Use this tool to deploy cloud-init
enabled images from various Linux
distributions on Proxmox.
Proxmox does not support cloud-init
enabled images out of the box. It's
possible to create template from manually installed VMs. However, with the
availability of ready to deploy images from most major Linux vendors, why
should you install a VM manually?
cloud-init depends on two things:
- A minimal base installation of the distribution, usually in the form of a raw or qcow2 image. I call this a cloud image.
- The
cloud-init
package installed in the image.
cloud-init was originally made for Amazon EC2 and OpenStack. These platforms
have native support for cloud-init, and provide a datasource that cloud-init
can use to configure the VM. However, there are few alternative datasources
available that will work, even if the platform itself has no native support for
cloud-init
.
proxmox-deploy
uses the NoCloud datasource. For this approach, the VM
must have a copy of the cloud image as the first disk, and a read-only vfat or
iso9660 filesystem as the second disk. On this second disk, there must be two
files: user-data
and meta-data
.
proxmox-deploy
takes care of generating the user-data
and meta-data
files based on user input. proxmox-deploy
also takes care of creating a
Proxmox VM and uploading the cloud image and cloud-init
image into the
proper datastore. All that's left afterwards is turning on the VM.
All dependencies are installable using pip. To install globally, execute as root:
# pip install proxmox-deploy
Or to install into a virtualenv (as a normal user):
$ virtualenv env
$ . env/bin/activate
$ pip install proxmox-deploy
Make sure to activate your virtualenv before using or upgrading the tool later:
$ . env/bin/activate
To later upgrade it:
$ pip install --upgrade proxmox-deploy
After installing, simply use:
$ proxmox-deploy --proxmox-host <hostname> --cloud-images-dir <images directory>
And answer the interactive questions.
I have tested proxmox-deploy
with the following cloud images:
Distribution | Version | Status |
---|---|---|
Ubuntu | 14.04 15.10 16.04 | The -amd64-disk1.img images work. |
Fedora Server | 23 | The qcow2 image works. |
openSUSE | 13.2 | The -OpenStack-Guest.x86_64.qcow2 image works,
provided the VM has at least 512 MB RAM. The
minimal disk size is 10 GB. However, the first
NIC is called eth1 , so make sure to select
eth1 to configure. There is no suse user,
login as root. |
CentOS | The CentOS 6 image fails to boot, hanging at "Booting from hard disk". The CentOS 7 -GenericCloud.qcow2.xz image works. The minimal disk size will be 8G. |
|
Debian | 8 | Neither the qcow2 nor the raw image works. The
first boot results in a kernel panic and
subsequent boots won't run cloud-init ,
rendering the VM unreachable. |
FreeBSD | Does not work, cloudbase-init-bsd has no support for the NoCloud datasource. The official VM images boot at least, but cloud-init is not available. It will boot with with DHCP and a default user/password. |
All distributions provide a default user with the name of the distro (ubuntu, fedora, centos, debian, freebsd), except openSUSE which only has a root user.
- Proxmox VE 4.1
- Python 2.7
- proxmoxer as Proxmox API client
- openssh-wrapper for communicating with the Proxmox API and executing commands.
- Jinja2 for generating the
user-data
andmeta-data
files. - configobj for reading configuration files.
- pytz for timezone names.
genisoimage
(Linux) ormkisofs
(FreeBSD) command.
Do note that we need to access the Proxmox server via SSH, to perform the
various tasks. We also use the pvesh and pvesm commands over SSH to
interface with the Proxmox API and datastores respectively. proxmox-deploy
will not ask for passwords to login, so a proper SSH agent and SSH key access
must be configured before hand.
0.3 |
|
0.2 |
|
0.1 |
|
proxmox-deploy
is licensed under the GPLv3 license.