How to rename image files after using "qm importdisk"?

[ams_tschoening]

I'm migrating from VirtualBox to Proxmox and am creating the new VMs on the shell. Part of that is using "qm importdisk" to import available VMDK files as new QCOW2 ones. While that works in general, the result is a file like e.g. "encr_zfs:100/vm-100-disk-0.qcow2". While that is OK for only one disk per VM, I have multiple VMs with multiple disks in which case it would be good when looking at file names already to see which disk contains which content. It's about root vs. home vs. tmp vs. swap etc.

So, is there any option to "qm importdisk" I'm missing to provide a custom suffix for image files?

If not, what is the correct way of renaming the created image files? Simply using "mv" in the storage directory, before the disk has been attached to any VM? Or are is there any other bookkeeping involved already after importing only?

Does it make a difference which storage type is used? In my case it's an encrypted ZFS dataset, which is configured as storage type "dir" instead of ZFS in Proxmox. So Proxmox really only sees files instead of ZVOLs or alike.

Thanks!

 

[ams_tschoening]

Here is what seems to work for me:

qm 'importdisk' "${vm_id}" "${img_src}" 'encr_zfs' '--format=qcow2'
mv "${prefix_abs}-disk-0.qcow2" "${prefix_abs}-${img_dst}"
qm    'set' "${vm_id}" --scsi0 "encr_zfs:${prefix_rel}-${img_dst}${PXMX_DISK_OPTS}"
pvesh 'set' "${PXMX_API_NODE}/qemu/${vm_id}/config" '-delete' 'unused0'

One important thing to note is that after importing the disk, an "unused0" is added to the VM referencing it. After the same file has been renamed on the shell, that "unused0" needs to be removed, as it references no actual file anymore anyway.



Would be great to have some kind of rename-API working on storage like "importdisk" does already. Or even better, if the suffix "disk-0" could simply be provided by the caller of "importdisk", at least optionally.

 

[fabian]

yeah, improved renaming support is in the works: https://lists.proxmox.com/pipermail/pve-devel/2021-July/049445.html

 

[ams_tschoening]

Good news. Any plans to make suffixes of image files available in the web-UI as well? I can't find something like that for storage type dir. Not sure if "[pve-devel] [PATCH v1 storage 1/9] storage: expose find_free_diskname" goes into that direction already.

 

[fabian]

yeah, the plan is to gradually increase support for setting (and keeping) a custom suffix instead of the autogenerated '-disk-N' one. it just needs touching up in a lot of places, and with stuff like this the GUI is usually the last place where new features are exposed

 

[ams_tschoening]

yeah, the plan is to gradually increase support for setting (and keeping) a custom suffix instead of the autogenerated '-disk-N' one.[...]

While it becomes a bot off-topic, what does "keeping" exactly mean? Persisting a suffix per VM or node or whatever wouldn't help me. I would really need to provide a suffix per created disk image and for each and every new one a different one as well. So that I can create an image being used for "root" and name it that way, or "swap" or "windows_c", "mnt_luks", "var_tmp" etc.

With VBOX I even maintained a whole image name like "org.example.some-host_root.vmdk" etc., because it had a media manager independent of VMs as well and multiple "root.vmdk" only could be easily maintained. But Proxmox already takes care of that prefix part by e.g. "100/vm-100-[...]" and I can live with that, might even be better than my former naming scheme as it's shorter. Though, having some control over an individual suffix per image would be nice.

 

[fabian]

keeping as in if you move the disk to another storage/format, or migrate the guest and thus re-create its local volumes on the other end, PVE should try to preserve the suffix for the newly created volume on the other storage/node.