how to organize ISOs in storage?

necrien

New Member
Nov 24, 2022
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How does everybody organize their 100s of ISOs? Is there a way to make ProxMox honor folders?
 
How does everybody organize their 100s of ISOs? Is there a way to make ProxMox honor folders?
No. All have to be in the root of the iso folder. What I do is renaming the ISOs, so they are sorted in the way I want. But I'm no ISO hoarder, so scrolling isn't that bad. All my VMs got empty virtual DVD drives, so no need to keep a local copy of old ISOs. I just need them once when installing a new VM and then I usually have to download and upload the most recent ISO anyway.
 
Last edited:
You could probably write a script that symlinks or hardlinks the isos from nested sorted folders into the root of the iso storage...but way too much effort...
 
You could probably write a script that symlinks or hardlinks the isos from nested sorted folders into the root of the iso storage...but way too much effort...
Yes we do that. We organize them (for Linux) with <distribution name> and symlink them to the appropriate file structure for PVE <storage-path>/template/iso.
We have different directories (so different NFS storages configured in PVE) for various distributions, yet not 100 iso files. Why so much? You only need the most recent one of each distribution version and most of my Linux boxes are just installed via network boot/pxe, so I don't need any ISO for them. At most, we have 30 iso files lying around.
We have every iso-server running inside PVE itself, so the static part (upstream iso files) and another server for your "enriched" iso files with our packages, preseed/kickstart automation.
 
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Same here: scan the torrents folder for ISO's and create links to them in the Proxmox storage (run every so often).
Bash:
#!/bin/bash
SRC="/srv/torrents/"
DST="/var/lib/vz/template/iso/"
find "${DST}" -type l -exec bash -c '[ ! -f {} ] && rm {}' ';'
find "${SRC}" -name '*.iso' -exec cp -asu {} "${DST}" ';'
 
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There has to be another solution. How do we submit an enhancement suggestion?
My imaginary 'solution' was to add a directory to the Datacenter Storage and specify that it contains ISOs, amongst other things
ID: FASTISOS
Type: Directory
Content: ISO image
Path/Target: /nimrod/ISOs

which, you would think, would work, but when I go to make a new VM and select an ISO, not so much.

hm, maybe it's not mounted right?

root@pr0xm0x:/nimrod/ISOs# zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
[...]
nimrod/ISOs 51.0G 117G 51.0G /nimrod/ISOs

hrm

root@pr0xm0x:/nimrod/ISOs# ls -al
total 44619043
drwxr-xr-x 8 jackd jackd 61 Jan 25 2016 .
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 7 Oct 29 05:18 ..
-rwxr-xr-x 1 jackd jackd 2144337920 Mar 7 2013 avlinux5.0.3-tube-lxde-i386-en.iso
-rwxr-xr-x 1 jackd jackd 613416960 May 10 2014 bodhi-2.4.0-32.iso


well, they sure look like they're there


sdc 8:32 0 2.7T 0 disk
├─sdc1 8:33 0 930G 0 part /root/tmp2
├─sdc2 8:34 0 1.8T 0 part /root/tmp
└─sdc3 8:35 0 64G 0 part /mnt/pve/ISOs

"No. All have to be in the root of the iso folder."

Well that's easy enough
root@pr0xm0x:/nimrod/ISOs# zfs get all nimrod/ISOs
nimrod/ISOs mountpoint /nimrod/ISOs default
root@pr0xm0x:/nimrod/ISOs# zfs set mountpoint=/pve/ISOs nimrod/ISOs
cannot unmount '/nimrod/ISOs': pool or dataset is busy
root@pr0xm0x:/nimrod/ISOs# cd / && echo "durr..., that helps"
root@pr0xm0x:/# zfs set mountpoint=/pve/ISOs nimrod/ISOs
root@pr0xm0x:/# ls /pve/ISOs/
avlinux5.0.3-tube-lxde-i386-en.iso PCBSD9.1-x64-DVD.iso
bodhi-2.4.0-32.iso pmagic-5.10.iso

Now I go to make a new virtual machine and "yay ISOs!" still kind of [REDACTED], though, I'd like if I add a new folder with ISO images it gets automatically scanned and added to list, images are verified with name.md5 and/or name.sha256 and Bob's your uncle.

The combined mount points are most likely going to cause problems.
 

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