This builds an up-to-date Proxmox VE Vagrant Base Box.

Currently this targets Proxmox VE 8.

Usage

Create the base box as described in the section corresponding to your provider.

If you want to troubleshoot the packer execution see the .log file that is created in the current directory.

After the example vagrant environment is started, you can access the Proxmox Web Interface with the default root user and password vagrant.

For a cluster example see rgl/proxmox-ve-cluster-vagrant.

About this fork

This fork contains various changes with the goal to create a box that can be used to test proxmox upgrade scenarios.
The following notable changes have been implemented:

• Dropped support for Hyper-V and VirtualBox
• Changed locales to Switzerland (de_CH)
• Switched package mirror to https://pkg.adfinis-on-exoscale.ch
• Removed provisioner script that upgrades the base image
• Added a pipeline to build the base box

libvirt

Create the base box:

make build-libvirt

Add the base box as suggested in make output:

vagrant box add -f proxmox-ve-amd64 proxmox-ve-amd64-libvirt.box

Start the example vagrant environment with:

cd example
vagrant up --no-destroy-on-error --provider=libvirt

Proxmox

Set the Proxmox VE details:

cat >secrets-proxmox.sh <<EOF
export PROXMOX_URL='https://192.168.1.21:8006/api2/json'
export PROXMOX_USERNAME='root@pam'
export PROXMOX_PASSWORD='vagrant'
export PROXMOX_NODE='pve'
EOF
source secrets-proxmox.sh

Create the template:

make build-proxmox

NB There is no way to use the created template with vagrant (the vagrant-proxmox plugin is no longer compatible with recent vagrant versions). Instead, use packer or terraform.

Packer build performance options

To improve the build performance you can use the following options.

Accelerate build time with Apt Caching Proxy

To speed up package downloads, you can specify an apt caching proxy (e.g. apt-cacher-ng) by defining the environment variables APT_CACHE_HOST (default: undefined) and APT_CACHE_PORT (default: 3124).

Example:

APT_CACHE_HOST=10.10.10.100 make build-libvirt

Decrease disk wear by using temporary memory file-system

To decrease disk wear (and potentially reduce io times), you can use /dev/shm (temporary memory file-system) as output_directory for Packer builders. Your system must have enough available memory to store the created virtual machine.

Example:

PACKER_OUTPUT_BASE_DIR=/dev/shm make build-libvirt

Remember to also define PACKER_OUTPUT_BASE_DIR when you run make clean afterwards.

Variables override

Some properties of the virtual machine and the Proxmox VE installation can be overridden. Take a look at proxmox-ve.pkr.hcl, variable blocks, to get an idea which values can be overridden. Do not override iso_url and iso_checksum as the boot_commands might be tied to a specific Proxmox VE version.

Create the base box:

make build-libvirt VAR_FILE=example.pkrvars.hcl

The following content of example.pkrvars.hcl:

• sets the initial disk size to 128 GB
• sets the initial memory to 4 GB
• sets the Packer output base directory to /dev/shm
• uses all default shell provisioners (see ./provisioners) and a custom one for german localisation

disk_size = 128 * 1024
memory = 4 * 1024
output_base_dir = "/dev/shm"
shell_provisioner_scripts = [
  "provisioners/apt_proxy.sh",
  "provisioners/upgrade.sh",
  "provisioners/network.sh",
  "provisioners/localisation-de.sh",
  "provisioners/reboot.sh",
  "provisioners/provision.sh",
]

Packer boot_command

The Proxmox installation is automatically configured using the answer.toml file, but to trigger the automatic installation, this environment has to nudge the default Proxmox installation ISO to use the answer.toml file through the packer boot_command interface. This is quite fragile, so be aware when you change anything. The following table describes the current steps and corresponding answers.

step	boot_command
select "Advanced Options"	<end><enter>
select "Install Proxmox VE (Automated)"	<down><down><down><enter>
wait for the shell prompt	<wait1m>
do the installation	proxmox-fetch-answer partition >/run/automatic-installer-answers<enter><wait>exit<enter>