Suggestion: Add a Cloning tab in Proxmox VE beside the migration tab. Please?

[pmard]

With amazement I have just experienced the online migration at work in KVM. It took 45 seconds to do the full w2k8r2 online migration in my Supermicro/Scale setup. Great!!!

I would like to suggest a new tab in the Proxmox web interface.

Beside the Migration tab: a Clone tab. This tab would lead you to a pane where you insert the new information for the clone such as Name, IP, GW, NS and so on, just to avoid going through the time consuming installation/pathing of the Windows 2008 server repeatedly. Are there any plans for this typw of enhancement at this time?

Is there a simple way to do this from the command line?

Please advice.

Cheers,
///peo

 

[dietmar]

Beside the Migration tab: a Clone tab. This tab would lead you to a pane where you insert the new information for the clone such as Name, IP, GW, NS and so on, just to avoid going through the time consuming installation/pathing of the Windows 2008 server repeatedly.

Just tell me how to implement that. Clone is a very difficult operation, because you need to change information inside the VM (ssh keys, ...)

 

[jleg]

For us, it would be really useful even with the restriction of the to-be-cloned-vm having to be shut down. Clone, start new vm, change settings, start original vm.
And for OpenVZ vms, it should not be a problem anyway - IP is set "from outside", doing it with simple scripts works for us...

 

[dietmar]

And for OpenVZ vms, it should not be a problem anyway - IP is set "from outside", doing it with simple scripts works for us...

Setting the IP is not not the problem.

 

[jleg]

Setting the IP is not not the problem.

"works for us" => means it propably depends on "purpose" and "usage" - if the use case does not bother about "ssh keys" or whatever besides "IP", a cloning functionality could still be useful even if not being 'perfect'.
Even in case of VMs running flavours of "Windows" this might be true - yes, dealing with SID or activation issues might be something for those commercial cloning tools - but perhaps a "raw" clone still might be useful in a simple HA scenario...

 

[tarax]

I've bookmarked libguestfs for this kind of tasks. It seems to have powerful tools to work with VM images, and even some specifically with W$ ones.
But still haven't had the occasion to play with it.

Hope it helps

 

[jleg]

I've bookmarked libguestfs for this kind of tasks. It seems to have powerful tools to work with VM images, and even some specifically with W$ ones.
But still haven't had the occasion to play with it.

Hope it helps

thanks for the pointer, looks really interesting; but it does not seem to be a feasable option for proxmox environments ('higher' kernel requirements). There's also 'virt-clone' - but this is based on libvirt, and therefore probably also not practical on a proxmox system.

 

[jguerra]

Yes, that would be a great option of cloning a virtual machine that's been already setup.

Or, possibly, creating a backup and restoring to a new VM Id would be similar (I haven't tried this) but it seems doable.