I want to know the Creation date of virtual machines. full list. HELP !!!

[omerusta37]

Hello there,

I want to know the Creation date of virtual machines. I need to list all virtual machines.

I tried it with pvesh commands, but it does not give the creation date.

How do I find out the creation date?

 

[Chris]

Hi,
you can look at the output of stat /etc/pve/qemu-server/<VMID>.conf, that should show you when the VM config was created.

Not sure if that is what you intended.

Edit: Also, this is included in the meta config property as ctime, so just dump the VM config qm config <VMID> will give you the config including the timestamp, which will survive eventual deletion/recreation of the config.

 

[h3po]

I am facing the same problem, need to get the creation date of each VM.
@Chris Stat of the conf file is not helpful because pmxcfs does not store the creation date of the file. the ctime metadata in the config does not represent the creation date of the VM, but the date of the qemu binary.
The tasks log would be the obvious place to look, but those are not helpful either because the log is not cleared when a vm is deleted and the vmid reused. Also qmclone tasks are in no way associated with the vmid they are creating, just the vmid of the template.
In summary, there doesn't seem to be any proxmox-native way to get the VM creation date. I will be using the metadata of the zfs disks associated with the VM, but this approach is of course depending on the use of zfs storage.

 

[bbgeek17]

he ctime metadata in the config does not represent the creation date of the VM, but the date of the qemu binary.

I believe you are mistaken about this:

root@pve-1:~# date
Thu May 22 12:39:13 PM UTC 2025
root@pve-1:~# qm create 100
root@pve-1:~# date -d @$(qm config 100 | sed -n 's/.*ctime=\([0-9]*\).*/\1/p')
Thu May 22 12:39:20 PM UTC 2025

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