The cloud-init tutorial alone will save me a lot of time. Thanks Jim

Great video as always Jim! Some additional settings that might be helpful: Under options,. disable the "disable tablet for pointer" (saves resources) Set the bios to UEFI: qm set 5000 --bios ovmf --efidisk0 local-lvm:1,format=qcow2,efitype=4m,pre-enrolled-keys=1 qm set 5000 --agent enabled=1 to enable the QM agent Once you started the VM installing the QM Agent: sudo apt install -y qemu-guest-agent

Hi Jim! Great video! Creating virtual machine templates WITH cloud-init is probably the most valuable thing I learned in 2023! This has saved me so much time! Thanks for such great content. I am really enjoying watching your videos and I have learned so much!

🙏 Very fluent, comprehensible, and useful video. Thank you

Just used this video to setup cloud-init and some vms.....your videos are great! Continuing to watch the k3s ones as well. Thanks so much for taking to the time to explain and show how to do all this in detail.

Thanks for the demo and info, have a great day

Thanks for your good and clear explanation!

Great tutorial Jim, really love the way you explain it clearly and also it's so important that people aren't made to run on this before they can walk. I see so many KZfaq videos that show how to get setup but don't explain or worse, don't even set things up well.

following the guide in the Rancher video, my cluster kept dying (kubernetes stopped responding). Took me a beat to figure out the VM had run out of disk space (3.5G doesn't get one far). Unless I missed it, you might want to add a step to resize the disk on the template before deploying the VMs. However, I also want to give you props for your work! It is awesome, very well explained and detailed and definitely a great help!

Jim, I really appreciate the efforts you put into your videos. I've been wanting to spin up a K8s cluster for awhile. Following along and looking forward to the next video. Cheers!

Great series. Thanks.

Great video, thanks!

Part 2 already?! Jim you're the man!

Fantastic :) Thank you

really excited to see more of this series

Nice guide, i am trying to follow up. You should make a custom youtube playlist just for this series, it will be easier to follow up than just 1 play list with all your videos

Thanks. I wish Proxmox would make this easier, so we don't need to use commandline at all.. but following your tutorial make it doable!

Nice videos and can't wait to see the next one.

Love it! Take your time, but I can't wait!

thank you will try it

One thing to note here is that at least as of today (Mar 2024), this approach won't work in case you wanted to deploy these cloud-init images on iSCSI drives - at least not with TrueNAS. From what I was able to gather, the PVE clone operation inherently requires virtual disk allocation and this is not possible with iSCSI-only based storage. I don't think a workaround is possible at this moment and I don't know many more details - kind of surprised, though, as I would imagine cloud-init deployments on SAN drives would be _ideal_ for deployments at scale. Nevertheless, this approach works great with local Proxmox storage - Jim, thanks a lot for all these videos, they're one of the best I've come across. Hope you do a full K8s tutorial one day!

Nice tutirial! @Jim's Garage, If you are getting an error like : unable to parse directory volume name 'vm-900-disk-0.raw' when running qm set 5000--scsihw virtio-scsi-pci --scsi0 local:vm-5000-disk-0 try qm set 5000--scsihw virtio-scsi-pci --scsi0 local:5000/vm-5000-disk-0.raw

Algorithm... Give this man views! Great work Jim

Great video. Thank you

Thank you for this!

is there a way to install additional packages into template before we start cloning, i do not want run ansible on many VMs, would be great clone ready to work VM just after cloning

Awesome, been waiting for these. When you set this up does the disk size expand as needed or was it static. Noticed yours was only 3GB or so

wow big thanks for the nice videos

Thanks for the awesome tutorial. Would it be nice to also see how this can be done using Hashicorp Packer and Terraform to create the VM templates

Great and well made tutorial . Thank you a lot Jim ! But i do have a question : why choose serial0 socket for the video output instead of vga ?

Awesome work! Any chance you could get into setting up a virtual pfsense or firewall? If you're getting into K8s content, I found there was a significant drop in content around observability (specifically, prometheus and alert manager)

nice video! It could be worth noticing that proxmox supports(since some time now) the --import-from, like in the command --virtio0 :0,import-from= to cut the import-assign commands and make it a one liner.(I would use virtio as disk type instead of scsi) Also, I don't know if it's actually intended, but you did not resize the disks?

Hi! Nice video! I have a question: How did you manage to give the VM internet access? Did you set up IP tables in the Proxmox console or something similar? I’m asking because I configured the VM’s network as you mentioned, using vmbr0, but I still don’t have internet access.

Nice video like always. Something I noticed is that you didn't enable the QEMU Guest Agent directly in the template, but I suppose that you do it for your existing VMs right?

Thanks for this guide, whole channel serves great content. I have a question - Is it supposed to work for cloudinit + pxe 8.1.4 + Telmate pxe provider 2.9.14 OR 3.0.1-rc1? On new, clean setup 2.9.14 crashes on VM creation, 3.0.1-rc1 drops all disks on VM creation and we land in ipxe loop Regrads,

Hi Jim, thanks for the vids, really like your clear calm concise instruction. I was really keen to work through this but got completely stopped at the ssh keys in the cloud-init. You seemed to just step over the key with "I used the key associated with proxmox". Where from? Is this a step I've missed from a different video?

Thanks for the video Jim! I just have one tiny problem. The clones that I`m making from the template wont get an ip and therefor I cant ssh to them, do you have any idea of what can I do to fix this?

I wish cloud-init had an option for Git URL for init script that it would run on first run.

Two questions: 1) Is there a way to point the apt update sources to a local repository or do you need to use a DNS server to perform that DNS redirection? (Normally, I edit /etc/apt/sources.list to point it to my local repository. It doesn't look like that would be an option for this, pre-start.) 2) With this being a VM, I am assuming that if you were to pass a GPU through to it, only the VM will be able to use said GPU and no other VMs created through this process will be able to use any other GPUs that might otherwise be physically installed in your system, correct? Thank you.

Commenting to trick KZfaq algorithm

Nice. Another nice feature is the behind the scenes is the auto partition resize. The auto update is for each restart or only for the first run only? It would be nice to use Terraform for templates and VMs provisioning.

Thanks for making these! That said, I am incredibly hung up at the SSH key part. Everything is being ran on a single host on your "proxmox-dell". I have three different Lenovo Thinkcentre's in a proxmox cluster I want to distribute the 5 VM's across (for high availability reasons; master and worker on first machine, master worker on second, and a third master node VM on the third proxmox host). If I am understanding right, for Kubernetes this is the approach most would want to take, rather than running VM's on a single host. With the script, I am totally blind on how I would integrate three different SSH proxmox host keys into the mix with the 5 VMs. Also, rather than setup an admin VM, it would be cool to just use a bare metal terminal on my Windows machine. Anyone have any idea how to do this? Or is this script just incapable of working with a HA setup like this?

Hi Jim, cannot seem to use Putty to SSH into the newly minted VMs.... hoping you can shed some lights... Thank you.

Hi Jim, Do you happen to know why Ubuntu 23.10 (Mantic) does not have kvm optimized images like what Lunar has? Should something else be used these days?

Thanks for this video. Only issue I have: my vms are not getting any IP. I'm using IPv6 only but neither ip6=dhcp nor ip6=auto works. Any help on that? :\

Hi Jim, if you keep it up, you'll hit the 100,000 subscriber mark by the middle of next year at the latest! But very important: do it without pressure and just for the fun of it!

I have a bit of a question. Your "nvme" disk is local to the machine you are running this (proxmox-dell). This would not work for cloning VMs onto the other machine (proxmox-asus). Is that right? I know at this point I have options for shared storage (NFS, ZFS?, ceph?) If I want my template to create VMs on any of my servers (I have 3) I need to make all this on a shared storage setup. Not sure which to choose. Any suggestions?

Thanks for the tutorial! I couldn't work out what on my system corresponds to your storage named 'nvme'. I tried 'local-zfs' and got the result: 'local-zfs:vm-5000-disk-0' . Which appears in the VM-Disks section of my 'local-zfs' storage in the gui. Well and good but.. How do I find this storage location using the cli?

Tnak you very much Jim. My CloudInit and VM machines storage is in my NAS storage name NFSSHARE nd after enterning this command :"qm set 5000 --scsihw virtio-scsi-pci --scsi0 NFSSHARE:vm-5000-disk-0" I tget the following error:"unable to parse directory volume name 'vm-5000-disk-0'", What am I missing ?

Is there a way to install the Guest agent tools via cloud-init?

hi! love your videos, verry helpfull. i have one qustion. i have the servers up and running, i can acces them with ssh from winscp, but i cannot access it from my linux terminal via ssh. "Permission denied (publickey)." . When i setup a ubuntuserver manualy, this is no problem

Thank you so much for this videos. Can i install v1.29.2+k3s1 version?

how do you expand the disk size after you load the img to it, there is no option on the GUI

I think you can do everything from GUI apart from assigning the cloud init image.

Jim is it possible to login as root when you use these cloud images? Thanks in advance.

I'm using XenServer and XenOrchestra, lets see if they have cloud init. I have an ryzen mini, i could install proxmox on 🤔

I'm wondering if i'm the only one having this issue. When i start the VM, it seems to not complete cloud-init and kind of freeze. Console is showing a login windows but the configured cloud-init user isn't working. Trying to reboot the machine trough proxmox fails. Only the stop command works. On 2nd boot it seems that cloud-init is working and the user account, network config and SSH all start working. Or any idea what i'm doing wrong? But very nice video/serie, will follow for sure as i'm running k8s already in my homelab.

I'm getting error 'unable to parse directory volume name 'vm-9002-disk-0' when running 'qm set 9002 --scsihw virtio-scsi-pci --scsi0 proxmox-img:vm-9002-disk-0' any clue what might be the issue?

Everything is working till the SSH part, not very sure how to copy the keys and use the same keys to ssh into all the VMs that we created. Can you help to explain more details how to copy out the keys.

Unfortunately, when I use Ubuntu 22.04 it seems to work, does all the update and then gets locked on "starting serial terminal on interface serial0" and it cannot be stopped. So, unfortunately, bit of a waste of an hours for me here. Never mind.

Great tutorial but OMG u could ran into so much problems if u try a little bit different config. I tried with QEMU guest agent active. The serial terminal then shows only connected. I switched to the default Display and saw "GRUB_FORCE_PARTUUID set, attempting initrdless boot" doing nothing. I searched it up and found out the problem gets solved with the normal could init image not the kvm one. With that one u don't need the serial terminal, but I ran into another problem. U can't shutdown the VM if u have QEMU guest agent active and not installed. Don't mix it. Now I'm using the KVM image and no guest agent active. I hope this helps someone who also tries some other config.

Not all the steps worked for me. I had to set the remaining task manually. qm create 9000 --memory 2048 --core 2 --name ubuntu-cloud --net0 virtio,bridge=vmbr0 cd /var/lib/vz/template/iso/ qm importdisk 9000 lunar-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk-kvm.img local qm set 9000 --ide2 local:cloudinit qm set 9000 --serial0 socket --vga serial0 Thanks for the great explanation!!!

I have been stuck on being able to SSH into the VM's. I've followed your steps exactly but get an error trying to SSH in that says "Permission Denied (Public Key)". Ive gone back through and reinstalled everything several times from scratch so this has been an all-day exercise for me. During one of the clean installs I tried removing the cloud-init SSH public key entry and still nothing. Strange thing is when I install openssh on any other Ubuntu desktop VM I can SSH into those just fine. Ubuntu 'Server' is my nemesis! Please if anyone can help. I've tried rebooting, several google searches, maybe its a permission issue on the VM?, wrong public key from the Proxmox host?

i have a script to make the templet for prokmox

Trust me, it's better to eat like an Italian and ride like an American :D

I tried this but fail early in the process. qm importdisk 5000 lunar-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk-kvm.img local --> Successfully imported disk as 'unused0:local:5000/vm-5000-disk-0.raw' qm set 5000 --scsihw virtio-scsi-pci --scsi0 local:vm-5000-disk-0 --> unable to parse directory volume name 'vm-5000-disk-0' I'm running a 3 node HA Proxmox cluster on 8.1.4 PVE.

sed 's/ubuntu/debian/g' 😎