Proxmox VE Full Course: Class 6 - Creating Virtual Machine Templates

[Music] hello again everyone and welcome back to my proxmox course here in class number six what we'll be doing is creating our very own template for our virtual machines i don't know about you but installing operating systems is fun i love checking out different operating systems and linux distributions but when i want to launch something into production i really don't want to go through like 10 000 steps every single time it's time to launch a virtual machine i want to simplify that process and that's what we're going to do right now alright so in the previous class we went ahead and created our first virtual machine and we see that virtual machine right here now what i'm going to do like i mentioned in the intro is show you guys the process of creating your very own virtual machine template this will definitely save you a lot of work in the future now here in the terminal i'm connected to the vm via ssh and what i want to do is add some additional value to the template before we create it if we're not careful there's some things that will remain the same in every vm that we create from the template things that we actually don't want to remain the same one example of that is the ssh host keys we can see the ssh host keys right here and this is not an ubuntu specific thing in general when you have ssh there's host keys the host keys themselves are created when you first install ssh and if these ssh host keys are the same on every vm then your ssh client is going to be very confused every time you connect your servers so what can we do about that first what we're going to do is search for the cloud init package which is most likely already installed so i'm just going to run apt search cloud init i'll scroll up a bit here we can see the cloud init package right here and it's currently installed so we already have it if we didn't have it already then we could simply run sudo apt install and then cloud hyphen init just like that but obviously i don't need to do that it's already installed now i have an entire video that is dedicated to cloud init so i'm not going to go into too much detail about it here but what does cloud init actually do the short answer is quite a bit actually cloud init features a number of modules that you can use to essentially master an image or in our case a template in a nutshell it allows you to automate a series of tasks that you normally would do every time you set up a new linux server and when it comes to resetting the ssh host keys that's a given that's one of the many things that cloud init does for us having cloud init installed and ready to go isn't actually enough to fully reset the ssh host keys so what we're going to do is change directory into the sc ssh directory and there we have the host keys you could tell which keys are the host keys because they have host in the name so what i'm going to do is sudo rm ssh underscore host underscore and then star upper center and as you can see all the host keys have been deleted and with the host keys being absent that's going to help trigger cloud init to regenerate those for us now the ssh host keys aren't the only files that we want to make sure are reset when we go to master this template there's an additional file that we want to empty out as well and it's this one right here the machine id is something that needs to be unique per vm and not every linux distribution is going to have this particular file right here but ubuntu has it and we need to make sure that this is emptied out now you might be under the impression that you could probably just delete this file but in my experience that doesn't actually work but what we could do instead is empty the file completely and one easy way to do that is to run sudo and then truncate and then we type dash s for size we set the size to exactly zero and the file that we want to empty out is slash etsy slash machine id so i'll press enter and that was easy now there's actually a symbolic link to the machine id file and we want to make sure that it is in fact a symbolic link and this is a different machine id file actually it's located in slash bar lib slash dbus and then the name is machine id and we can see here that this particular file is in fact a sim link and we know that we have this little arrow right here we also have the l right here and it's pointing to the same file that we emptied out now if for some reason that's not a symbolic link you can simply create a symbolic link but if you did run the ls command against that file and it shows that it's a symbolic link then you're fine and you don't have to do what i'm about to do so what we're going to do is run sudo and then ln s we're going to create that symbolic link that's what the lm-s command allows us to do and the file that we want to link to is of course slash jetsea slash machine id and we want to store this link at slash var live slash dbus slash machine hyphen id i'll press enter and now let's just make sure that everything is correct ls dash l slash var slash live dbus machine id and we can see that it is indeed pointing to the correct place the machine id file and here we can see that the etsy machine id file is empty and if all that checks out we should be good to go now don't worry too much about what the etsy machine id file actually is just keep in mind that it's an identifier that differentiates this server from other servers if every vm had the same machine id that would be a problem it just helps servers identify each other by id if every server had the same id that would be well confusing and again not every linux distribution uses this so just keep in mind that the machine id has to be unique if your distro doesn't use etsy machine id then you don't need to do any of this now there's a few other commands that i recommend you consider running just to clean the template basically we want to make sure that it's as clean as we could possibly get it and i'm not going to go into too much detail on this there's all kinds of things that you could do to clean up an image but what i'm going to do is give you some easy ones right now that'll certainly help first of all let's run sudo apt clean that's a quick command it's just going to essentially clean the apt database in downloaded packages and things like that there's probably no reason to have that template include a cache of packages especially considering that those packages could very well be out of date by the time you get around to creating a new vm from this template another command to consider is sudo apt auto remove now it didn't do anything for me but every now and then there could be orphan packages that are just installed for no apparent reason or no longer have a use and what sudo apt auto remove does is that allows you to remove those orphan packages after all packages that are not required are just wasting space now those are the only things that i'm going to walk you guys through when it comes to preparing this vm to become a template obviously there's all kinds of things that you can do here for example if there's any packages or configuration files that you want to make sure that every vm has it's a good idea to add it we already installed the qemu agent in the previous video but if you haven't already done so it's a good thing to include anyway i'm all set on my end so what i'm going to do is just power down this particular vm so i will run sudo and then power off i'll press enter and that's it so now we have our vm right here and like i mentioned we want to create a template from this particular vm just keep in mind that the process we're about to go through is destructive meaning we can't undo this so just be sure that you actually do want to create a template from your vm before you continue anyway i'll right click on it and then i'll click convert to template i'll click yes and that's all there is to it it might take a few seconds or maybe a minute but we should see the icon right here change as soon as it's converted and now we can see that the icon did in fact change so instead of a vm this web server instance right here is actually now a template so we actually have a template and we can even start using it right now but i'm not going to have you guys do that just yet the next step is arguably optional but it's a good practice to get into so what we're going to do is click on hardware and what we're going to do here is actually remove the attachment to the iso for the virtual disk so i'll click edit then i'll click do not use any media i'll click ok so now that's done and then next i'll click add and then what i'll do is add a cloud init drive for the storage i'll drop this down and i'll choose local lvm let's go ahead and create it and as you can see here we have a cloud init drive listed in the list of hardware here that's pretty cool and now that we have that we can go here to cloud init and we can go ahead and edit some of these items right here so i'm going to edit the default username my user is actually included in the image anyway but it's a good habit to get into and this is something that will give you further customization as you get further ahead in proxmox i'll click ok and here i can set the password i'll click edit and that allows us to set the password for the default user and in our case that's redundant because we already did that during the installation of ubuntu but this is part of the normal workflow when it comes to the process of setting up cloud init so it's a good idea to get in the habit in addition to that we have other options here i'm not going to go over these but one thing that you might want to consider doing is adding your ssh public key right here if you decide to if you have one that could be very useful but other than that that's about it i'll click regenerate image and now we're actually done with the template so to create a brand new vm from the template we simply right click on the template and then we click clone and cloning is the verbiage when we create a vm from a template we are cloning the template into a vm so naturally it's going to select the next available id by default you can of course change that if you wish and for this i'm going to change it to full clone full clone is better it's an entire copy of that particular template it's not a differential or anything like that it's a full-blown copy the target storage even though same as source is probably okay i like to be explicit i'll set it to the storage that i want it to be which is the local lvm for the name i'm going to call it web server hyphen 1 and that should be good enough so i'll click clone [Music] it's going to begin the process but you know what i'm going to go ahead and create another vm from this template and i'm going to go through the same process here as i did last time and i'll call this one web server 2. and now we can see that it's creating and of course we could check the status down here it looks like it's already done so what i'm going to do is right click on this vm i'll start it up i'll do the same thing for this one here and we can watch the progress here on the console it's already starting the other one should start shortly and that one's starting to and there we go we have a vm so what i'm going to do is just log in real quick right here and grab the ip address and see what it was assigned text is kind of small but it's 249.250 the last two octets here so i'll go down here to my terminal and there we go we're connected now the name here says web server so we should fix that i'll do that in a moment let's go ahead and connect to the other one so back up here in proxmox i'm going to do the same thing i'll grab the ip address so i'll log in ipspace a that's the command i can use again to grab the ip address and in this case it was given an ip address that ends in 251 so let's go ahead and do it there we go we're logged into both vms now the last thing that i recommend that we do is update the host name and the reason for that is because they're both called web server and that's a bit confusing so let's go ahead and update that we'll run sudo and then nano and the first file that we want to edit on this vm right here is slash etsy slash host name i'll press enter type in my super secret password so i'll append dash 1 to the end of the name here ctrl o and then enter to save the file ctrl x to exit out the next file i'm going to edit is slash etsy hosts and i'll do the exact same thing here change it to web server hyphen 1 save the file let's reboot it then here do the same thing we'll change that to web server hyphen 2. and again in etsy hosts web server hyphen two and then i save the file again ctrl o and then enter and then ctrl x to exit out now the server should be rebooting and that's exactly what they're doing this one should already be done actually we can see the host name right here is web server hyphen one and here we have web server hyphen two so we were able to create two vms from the template that's pretty cool i think that's going to help you guys out in eliminating some of the work that goes into setting up a new linux server with a template you can automate all kinds of different things so i'll let your imagination take over from here but as far as this video in particular is concerned i think that'll do the trick so at this point you guys now know how to create your very own virtual machine templates and that's pretty cool it'll no doubt save you a ton of time going forward you won't have to go through the 10 000 or however many steps there are in the os install process because let's face it that can get a little old after a while now what we're going to do at this point in the course is actually take a break from virtual machines for the next two episodes because it's time to get into the topic of containers so make sure you keep your eye on the playlist on the series because i'll add all the new episodes to this series to that playlist as soon as they're out and make sure you subscribe if you haven't already done so and i'll see you in the next video thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: LearnLinuxTV

Views: 10,657

Keywords: Linux, Tutorial, Review, Howto, Guide, Distribution, Distro, Learn Linux, operating system, os, open-source, open source, gnu/linux, LearnLinuxTV, LearnLinux.tv, vm, virtual machine, virtualization, template, proxmox, pve, virtual environment, proxmox virtual environment, proxmox ve, how to, virtual machines, proxmox virtual environment tutorial, proxmox getting started, proxmox ve tutorial, proxmox ve 7.0, proxmox 7 tutorial, virtual machine tutorial, homelab setup

Id: t3Yv4OOYcLs

Length: 17min 56sec (1076 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 07 2021