Clone a virtual machine template

Options

option	description	Allowed values
vmid	virtual machine template id to be cloned	integer
name	virtual machine clone name	regex string
vm-description	virtual machine clone description	string
full-clone	A full clone VM is a complete copy and is fully independant to the original VM or VM Template, but requires the same disk space as the original.	N/A
storage	storage name (local or remote) where the virtual machine disk image will be cloned	string
target	the target proxmox node name where the cloned virtual machine will be assigned	string
block	will the clone process will block until it end ? It make sense on slow remote storage (like on NAS), we wait for the clone task to finish before doing the next clone. This prevent IO saturation on storage	N/A
duplicate	how many duplicate do we need ? each duplicate will get his name suffixed by an index.	integer

Info

vmid and name are mutualy exclusive

Examples

Clone a virtual machine template

proxcli vms clone --vmid 111 --name test --vm-description test --full-clone --block --target pve2 --storage b4papp

Clone a virtual machine template with cloud enabled template

This is the same command as for a normal clone but you need additional steps to set user, password, ssh public key and network configuration. Try the following commands after cloning finishes.

proxcli vms set --vmid 112 --ciuser myuser --cipassword mypassword --ipconfig "ip=dhcp" --sshkey "$(cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub)"
proxcli vms set --vmid 112 --cores 4 --memory 4096
proxcli vms resize --vmid 112 --disk virtio0 --size "50G"

Info

Make sure you already have a cloud init enabled template on your proxmox nodes. You can find in the next section an example of creating an ubuntu server cloud init enabled image.

Customize the cloudimg with embeded qemu-guest-agent

you will need virt-customize tool on your proxmox nodes in order to install qemu-guest-agent (install it with apt install libguestfs-tools) you also need an ubuntu cloud-init enabled image. You can find one here

virt-customize -a lunar-server-cloudimg-amd64.img --install qemu-guest-agent 
virt-customize -a lunar-server-cloudimg-amd64.img --run-command "echo -n > /etc/machine-id"

Create a cloud init enabled template on selected proxmox nodes

Those commands will help you create an ubuntu cloud init enabled virtual machine template. Adjust the variables at the begining of the script so it match your needs.

vmid=$(pvesh get /cluster/nextid)
isopath="/mnt/pve/isos/template/iso/lunar-server-cloudimg-amd64.img"
templatename="lunar-server-cloudinit"
memory=2048
storage="b4papp"
scsihw="virtio-scsi-pci"
devname="virtio"
disksize="5G"
qm create $vmid  --memory ${memory} --name ${templatename} --net0 virtio,bridge=vmbr0
qm set $vmid --agent enabled=1
qm importdisk $vmid $isopath $storage
qm set $vmid --scsihw $scsihw --${devname}0 ${storage}:${vmid}/vm-${vmid}-disk-0.raw
qm set $vmid --ide2 ${storage}:cloudinit
qm set $vmid --boot c --bootdisk ${devname}0
qm resize $vmid ${devname}0 ${disksize}    
qm set ${vmid} --serial0 socket --vga serial0  
qm template ${vmid}

Note

On some shared storages (like Synology NFS share), you may encounter the following error with qm template command:

/usr/bin/chattr: Operation not supported while reading flags on /mnt/pve/b4papp/images/111/base-111-disk-0.raw

You don’t have to do anything, it is just a limitation in synology hardening. But it does not affect the creation of a template.