proxmox-deploy

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?

How it works

cloud-init depends on two things:

1. A minimal base installation of the distribution, usually in the form of a raw or qcow2 image. I call this a cloud image.
2. 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cloud-init was originally made for Amazon EC2 and OpenStack.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.

How to install

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

How to use

After installing, simply use:

$ proxmox-deploy --proxmox-host <hostname> --cloud-images-dir <images directory>

And answer the interactive questions.

Tested cloud images

I have tested proxmox-deploy with the following cloud images:

Distribution	Version	Status
Ubuntu	14.04 15.10	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	6 7	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	10.1 cloud 10.1 vm	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.

Dependencies

• 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 and meta-data files.
• configobj for reading configuration files.
• pytz for timezone names.
• genisoimage (Linux) or mkisofs (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.

Changelog

0.2	Support for cloud-init Chef handoff (no autorun yet). Improve EnumQuestion output by listing and sorting options. Add option for automatically starting VMs after deployment. Choose defaults for node and storage selection. Support FreeBSD mkisofs command.
0.1	Initial release

License

proxmox-deploy is licensed under the GPLv3 license.