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Provisioning a Cloud-Init VM

Proxmox allows you to create both Virtual Machines via QEMU, and Containers via LXC. Out of the box, LXC containers are much easier to provision, you download the template, create the CT and specify the username, password & IP address. Virtual machines take longer to provision, but are much more flexible in usage. One big benefit is live migration without downtime. A container must be restarted when migrating to a different node.

Cloud-Init is a feature that will speed up deployment of Linux-based virtual machines, allowing you to provision a VM as quickly as a CT. This guide will assume that you already have a Debian-based Linux guest installed inside a virtual machine, and that you have OpenSSH server installed.

Logging into the virtual machine

Confirming the IP address

If you are using DHCP, you may need to confirm which IP address has been given to the Virtual machine. To do this, log into the CLI and run the following command:

ip a

This should give an output similar to below. The address we are interested in is the inet address listed below ens18. In this case, the address is 192.168.1.187

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: ens18: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 4a:69:2e:94:d8:56 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 192.168.1.187/24 brd 192.168.1.255 scope global dynamic ens18
       valid_lft 86194sec preferred_lft 86194sec
    inet6 fe80::4869:2eff:fe94:d856/64 scope link 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
SSH'ing into the machine

Then, ssh into your virtual machine:

ssh [email protected]

Enabling root access

During the preparation process, we will need to remove the user created during installation. In order to do this, we will need to log into the virtual machine as the root user.

Setting the root password

Once successfully logged in, you will need to use this command to set a password for the root user. This password will be used for all VMs that use the Cloud-Init template, so it is best to use a secure one!

sudo passwd root
(Optional) Enabling root ssh access

For security reasons, root SSH access is disabled by default. To make things easier, we can temporarily enable root SSH access by modifying the OpenSSH config file:

sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Add this line at the top of the file:

PermitRootLogin yes

Then save the file (Ctrl-S) and close Nano (Ctrl-X).

After saving the file, we will need to restart the SSH service for the changes to take affect:

sudo systemctl restart sshd

Now, confirm that we can SSH into the machine using the root user:

ssh [email protected]

Deleting the non-root user

Once we're logged in as root, we can remove the non-root user:

deluser --remove-home tempuser

You should see an output like below:

Looking for files to backup/remove ...
Removing user `tempuser' ...
Warning: group `tempuser' has no more members.
Done.

If you see an output like this, restart your virtual machine and try again:

userdel: user tempuser is currently used by process 1616
/usr/sbin/deluser: `/sbin/userdel tempuser' returned error code 8. Exiting.

We can then confirm that the user has been removed by checking the contents of /etc/passwd:

cat /etc/passwd | grep tempuser

If no output shows, we're good to go!

Installing the required packages

We now need to install a couple of packages to allow the Virtual Machine to communicate with Proxmox via Cloud-Init. If you used the Live installer for Ubuntu Server 20.04, some of these will already be installed.

apt install -y cloud-init cloud-initramfs-growroot qemu-guest-agent sudo git curl

Installing additional packages

 

Installing Zabbix agent

If you plan on monitoring your virtual machines using Zabbix, this is a good time to install the agent.

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