Have you tried to run CloudReady?

[mfreudenberg]

Hi,

i was wondering if anyone has ever tried to run CloudReady (https://www.neverware.com) as an VM in proxmox?
(CloudReady is an Chrome OS clone and free for home use).

So far i have tried to install it with two ways:

Created an USB drive, mounted it to my PVE-Host and passed it as USB-device to the VM. But somehow i wasn't able to boot from the USB drive. AFAIK the USB drive requires UEFI to boot. I set up an UEFI-Bios according the wiki and tried to boot from the correct bootloader (https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/OVMF/UEFI_Boot_Entries), but i still fail at booting from the passed through USB drive. After setting up and UEFI bios (with an EFI drive) i'm kind of stuck on how to boot from the USB key?

My second attempt was to download the OVA VMWare image from their page and convert the vmdisk in the OVA to a proxmox disk with the following guide:
https://www.itsfullofstars.de/2019/07/import-ova-as-proxmox-vm/
After i successfully imported the vmdisk to proxmox the VM gets stuck at the message "booting from hard disk..".

BR,
Michael

 

[Dominic]

Hi,

importing VMs into Proxmox VE has become much easier. For the CloudReady image

1. Move the .ova archive to the server (or some accessible shared storage)
2. Extract it
3. Run importovf
   

   qm importovf 137 CloudReady\ Home\ 83.4.ovf tank

   where you replace tank by your storage name and 137 by your desired VM ID

I got to the CloudReady logo with the following configuration

acpi: 1
bios: ovmf
boot: order=sata0
cores: 2
cpu: host
kvm: 1
memory: 4096
name: CloudReadyHome83.4
numa: 0
ostype: l26
sata0: tank:vm-137-disk-0
smbios1: uuid=7c0d489f-b463-4bcd-bb1b-50937a12f9e0
sockets: 2
vga: virtio,memory=16
vmgenid: d873cfa0-c6dc-4399-9ac5-ca82fab710e3

The most important steps seemed to be using UEFI instead of BIOS and virtio for VGA. But I am not sure yet if it will continue...

 

[mfreudenberg]

Hi,

thanks for the hint - i ididn't knew this import option.

TL;DR: I was able to import the OVF and boot the machine into the Desktop.

After importing via the mentioned method i did post adaptation on the created proxmox VM:

- Changed CPU type to "host"
- Increased number of cores to 4
- Changed BIOS to UEFI and added EFI disk
- Added network interface (virtio)
- changed display type to Virtio-GPU (not shure if this was initially set)

Whats working so far
- The chrome browser (internet as long as you have the vm connected)

Glitches, Bugs (on first try)
- The Desktop was blank on my machine (apart from the wallpaper). I had to click somewhere at the bottom to get a taskbar or chrome.
- Installing Linux does not work. The installer did dot completed successfully.
- The mouse wheel does not work (you have to simulate a finger drag across the screen with your mouse)
- a lot more, but it's too much to write down here

As it seems it's quite buggy and far away from a productive use (who would have thought it?)

 

[Dominic]

Great to hear that you got so far! Unfortunately, that process often requires experiment with a couple of VM configuration options.

Did you get the glitches with the noVNC shell? Maybe you can use some remote desktop solution (Chrome Remote Desktop) instead?