Automate Proxmox VMs with Cloud-Init

Originally published at kjetilfuras.com In my previous post, I showed how to provision VMs with NoCloud . That works great, but there’s an even faster approach: storing your cloud-init config directly in Proxmox’s snippets folder and referencing it with --cicustom. Automate Proxmox VMs with Cloud-Init method is cleaner, more manageable, and scales better when you’re provisioning multiple VMs with similar configurations. The Advantage of -cicustom Instead of generating ISOs for each cloud-init config, you: Store YAML templates in Proxmox Reference them by path when cloning VMs Reuse the same config across multiple clones Easily update configurations in one place Let’s walk through it. Download the Cloud Image SSH into your Proxmox server and download the latest Ubuntu 24.04 cloud image: cd /var/lib/vz/template/iso wget https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/releases/noble/release/ubuntu-24.04-server-cloudimg-amd64.img Verify the download: ls -lah /var/lib/vz/template/iso/ | grep ubuntu You sho