Creating New Machines

[jmace]

I am coming from VMWare Server 2.0 on the Windows server, so please bear with me...

What I am used to doing is setting up a number of virtual guests that are just bare-bones installs of the operating system I would like to use for my virtual machine. When I want to create a new virtual machine, I create one without a virtual disk. I then, copy the virtual disk from my bare-bones install to my new virtual machine's directory. I then add an existing virtual disk, the one I just copied over, to my new virtual machine. This works pretty well since I mainly use virtualization for integration testing of my applications.

My question is, what is the best way, in Proxmox, to "clone", if I'm using the right term, base install machines. I basically want to always have a fully updated and patched base install available to spawn new machines from without having to go through the entire install process.

Thank you in advance for any help you can give...

Jim

 

[dietmar]

My question is, what is the best way, in Proxmox, to "clone", if I'm using the right term, base install machines. I basically want to always have a fully updated and patched base install available to spawn new machines from without having to go through the entire install process.

You can use backup/restore for that purposre (vzdump).

 

[jmace]

I noticed that and it seems to work pretty well. Thanks

 

[jmace]

I have my virtual disks set to vmdk and I have my backups set to be compressed. Is it supposed to take 15-20 minutes to backup a 20 GB disk?

My vzdump command is: vzdump 103 --mode stop --compress 1 --storage backups --node vs

 

[tom]

depends on your hardware and network. the upcoming vzdump (in rc1) introduce lzo compression and improved disk scanning - will be overall faster.