Clone new VM using LVM snapshot

[jmharris]

Hi, great to see progress on the storage front with the new 1.4 release. It seems from the wiki documentation the preferred usage is to export storage to the proxmox machine over iscsi, then manage that storage locally using LVM to provide disks for VMs.

Commonly we create a new VM by cloning from an existing VM, using LVM snapshot functionality. Is this is a UI supported feature in proxmox? Atm it seems this can only be done by hand creating the snapshot image and then editing the VM conf file to add it.

 

[jmharris]

I see that images in LVM are marked as available for a particular VM by being tagged. LVM snapshots may not be tagged, so we'd have to snapshot, copy to a new clone image from the snapshot, then tag it and add to a VM.

This still leaves us having to manually create another VM definition, so in a nutshell is cloning support planned in Proxmox?

 

[dietmar]

This still leaves us having to manually create another VM definition, so in a nutshell is cloning support planned in Proxmox?

No, because I have no idea howto solves problems related to cloning (duplicate IPs, duplicate private keys, duplicate unique IDs, ...). Any suggestions?

 

[jmharris]

Hi, thanks for the reply- it's true that those are issues that need to be considered when cloning a VM, however I think it's up to the admin who created the VM to ensure they are appropriate for cloning. For example you could clone from a master image that on first boot can generate any unique values required. This appears to be a common pattern, e.g. the xen appliance from Openbravo acts in this way.

Additionally libvirt supports a clone in the manner that I am seeking: http://linux.die.net/man/1/virt-clone

So in a nutshell it would be really useful if Proxmox could just copy the disk and vm conf settings for me, rather than doing it by hand, for the first iteration of a clone feature.

 

[nick]

if you want to clone a machine an sollution is backup qemu machine and restore into a different ID.
Before that, stop original machine, and on cloned machine change Eternet and IP (if you use static IP's) and after that I think you can use both machines without any problem...

ATTENTION: if you use OEM software, atention to activation! It's not legal to clone an exiting activated windows! after restore, reactivate your clone windows with another license code.

 

[dietmar]

This appears to be a common pattern, e.g. the xen appliance from Openbravo acts in this way.

Sure, we plan to support KVM templates too (but this is different than cloning).

 

[jmharris]

Essentially it is still just a filesystem with some special scripts for first boot though, at least for the linux case. Or am I missing a more important point?

If backing up and then restoring to a different ID is equivalent then that's a workable solution, but the point to us of using Proxmox is to cut down on the hoop jumping manual admin work.

The licensing issue isn't really important tbh- it's not as though anyone is stopped from breaking license agreements by not having a less time consuming way of cloning things.

 

[andygee]

I too would love to see a interface to clone a vm. I agree that it's the end admin that should worry about the ip conflict etc, on the VMWare side when I was doing clones I would just disable the network interface until I was done to make sure there was no mistake.

Backup/Restore to a different id is doable but it would be very sweet just to choose to clone a machine.

I also would love to see a snapshot feature on a machine so that I could snapshot it before updates and then if updates cause problems then you roll back.

Just my .02 cents.

Andy