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Use this tool to deploycloud-init enabled images from various Linuxdistributions on Proxmox.

Proxmox does not supportcloud-init enabled images out of the box. It'spossible to create template from manually installed VMs. However, with theavailability of ready to deploy images from most major Linux vendors, whyshould you install a VM manually?

cloud-init depends on two things:

1. A minimal base installation of the distribution, usually in the form of araw or qcow2 image. I call this acloud image.
2. Thecloud-init package installed in the image.

cloud-init was originally made for Amazon EC2 and OpenStack. These platformshave native support for cloud-init, and provide a datasource thatcloud-initcan use to configure the VM. However, there are few alternative datasourcesavailable that will work, even if the platform itself has no native support forcloud-init.

proxmox-deploy uses theNoCloud datasource. For this approach, the VMmust have a copy of thecloud image as the first disk, and a read-only vfat oriso9660 filesystem as the second disk. On this second disk, there must be twofiles:user-data andmeta-data.

proxmox-deploy takes care of generating theuser-data andmeta-datafiles based on user input.proxmox-deploy also takes care of creating aProxmox VM and uploading thecloud image andcloud-init image into theproper datastore. All that's left afterwards is turning on the VM.

All dependencies are installable using pip. To install globally, execute asroot:

# 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 testedproxmox-deploy with the followingcloud images:

All distributions provide a default user with the name of the distro (ubuntu,fedora,centos,debian,freebsd), except openSUSE which only has aroot user.

• Proxmox VE 4.1 or later
• Python 2.7
• proxmoxer as Proxmox API client
• openssh-wrapper for communicating with the Proxmox API andexecuting commands.
• Jinja2 for generating theuser-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 thevarious tasks. We also use the pvesh and pvesm commands over SSH tointerface with the Proxmox API and datastores respectively.proxmox-deploywill not ask for passwords to login, so a proper SSH agent and SSH key accessmust be configured before hand.

proxmox-deploy is licensed under the GPLv3 license.