Context

This project has been a culmination of a few projects coalescing together at the same time: I’ve been wanting to play with Cloud-Init in a local environment for a little while now, and I’ve been finding myself spinning up more and more VMs to test some networking automation.

After a couple of nights of tweaking, I’ve found myself feeling really enjoying the amount of time I saved compared to manually creating VMs, and I wanted to summarize up my thoughts here.

Setup

As of writing, I am running Proxmox 8.2 and using Ubuntu 22.04. This should be much the same across other Ubuntu distros, I imagine I’ll try it on Ubuntu 24.04 fairly soon.

Steps

  1. Create a VM in Proxmox This is very similar with a normal VM, with a few differences:
    • I use a higher VM number to help organize
    • Select Do not use any media on the OS page
    • Enable QEMU Agent
    • Delete the SCSI0 disk that is automatically created
  2. Add a Cloud-Init device to the VM
    • Select the storage
  3. Go to the Cloud-Init page for the VM and configure some default settings:
    • User
    • Password
    • DNS domain
    • DNS servers
    • SSH public key
    • IP addressing
  4. SSH or use the console to download the Ubuntu cloud image using wget 
wget https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/releases/jammy/release/ubuntu-22.04-server-cloudimg-amd64.img
  • More coming soon!

References and resources