Proxmox

Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE) is an open source virtualization management software that allows deployment and management of KVM-based virtual machines and LXC containers. The platform itself run on a Debian based distribution and supports filesystems such as ZFS and Ceph.

In terms of functionality, Proxmox VE is similar to VMware ESXi with some overlap with vSphere. You can have a cluster of Proxmox servers controlled and managed through a singular web console, command line tools, or via the provided REST API.

Installation

Installation is as simple as installing any other Linux distribution. Download the Proxmox iso image from https://www.proxmox.com/en/downloads. After installation, you should be able to access the web console via HTTPS on port 8006.

Tasks

Remove the subscription nag

If your Proxmox server has no active subscription, you will be nagged every time you log in to the web interface. This can be disabled by running the following as root in the server's console:

sed -Ezi.bak "s/(Ext.Msg.show\(\{\s+title: gettext\('No valid sub)/void\(\{ \/\/\1/g" /usr/share/javascript/proxmox-widget-toolkit/proxmoxlib.js

See also, the ansible role at https://github.com/FuzzyMistborn/ansible-role-proxmox-nag-removal/blob/master/tasks/remove-nag.yml

Make a VM automatically start at boot

You can enable or disable a VM from starting with the Proxmox host as well as configure the order in which VMs are started.

The setting is located under the VM or container's 'Options' pane.

Proxmox start VM or container at boot

Deployment using Terraform

You can use Hashicorp's Terraform deployment tool to automatically provision virtual machines on Proxmox. After installing Terraform, follow the following steps to get your deployments working.

Setup Terraform

Terraform controls the Proxmox server using the Telmate Proxmox provider. For more information on each of the provider's options, review the documentation at https://registry.terraform.io/providers/Telmate/proxmox/latest/docs/resources/vm_qemu.

To quickly get started, we will:

1. Install Terraform
2. Setup an account with an API key on Proxmox. This account should have permissions to '/' as well as to any storage volumes it needs to create VMs on '/storage/data'. (TBD)
3. We will use the following main.tf file which will define the provider and provider configurations. The VM definitions are also included here.
4. Run terraform init to set up the provider
5. Run terraform plan to plan the tasks
6. Run terraform apply to create the VMs.

main.tf:

# Use Telmate proxmox provider
terraform {
  required_providers {
    proxmox = {
      source = "telmate/proxmox"
      version = "2.7.4"
    }
  }
}

# Configure the proxmox provider
provider "proxmox" {
  pm_api_url = "https://proxox-server:8006/api2/json"
  pm_api_token_id = "terraform@pam!terraform_token_id"
  pm_api_token_secret = "e458e7bc-d8e6-4028-885b-d0896f4becfa"
  pm_tls_insecure = true
}

# Define our first VM
resource "proxmox_vm_qemu" "test-vm" {
  count = 1                            # 0 will destroy the VM
  name = "test-vm-${count.index + 1}"  # count.index starts at 0. We want the VM to be named test-vm-1
  target_node = var.proxmox_host       # target proxmox host
  clone = var.template_name            # VM template to clone from
  
  os_type = "cloud-init"
  agent = 1
  cores = 2
  sockets = 1
  cpu = "host"
  memory = 2048
  scsihw = "virtio-scsi-pci"
  bootdisk = "sata0"

  disk {
    slot = 0
    size = "10G"
    type = "sata"
    storage = "data"
    iothread = 1
  }
  
  network {
    model = "virtio"
    bridge = "vmbr0"
  }
  
  lifecycle {
    ignore_changes = [
      network,
    ]
  }
  
  ipconfig0 = "ip=10.1.1.10${count.index + 1}/22,gw=10.1.1.1"
  
  # sshkeys set using variables. the variable contains the text of the key.
  sshkeys = <<EOF
  ${var.ssh_key}
  EOF
}

vars.tf:

variable "ssh_key" {
  default = "ssh-rsa  ... "
}

# This should be the exact same name as your proxmox node name
variable "proxmox_host" {
	default = "proxmox-server"
}

variable "template_name" {
	default = "rocky85-template"
}

Issues with the apply step

I kept on getting "400 Parameter verification failed":

╷
│ Error: 400 Parameter verification failed.
│
│   with proxmox_vm_qemu.test-vm[0],
│   on main.tf line 20, in resource "proxmox_vm_qemu" "test-vm":
│   20: resource "proxmox_vm_qemu" "test-vm" {
│
╵

The issues I encountered which triggered this error was:

• Incorrect host name for the Proxmox node
• Invalid values for the disk type (I tried changing type = "scsi" to type = "sata") while leaving iothread = 1 defined.

To help diagnose issues, review the provider's documentation and ensure the values you're using are appropriate. You may also want to enable additional logging by running with the TF_LOG=TRACE environment variable:

$ TF_LOG=TRACE terraform apply

Troubleshooting

LXC containers does not start networking

I have a Fedora based LXC container which takes a long time to start up. After the tty does start, the only network adapter isn't up. systemd-networkd is also in a a failed state with a bad exit code and status 226/namespace.

This was resolved by enabling nesting on this container with the following commands:

# pct set $CTID -features nesting=1 
# pct reboot $CTID