README.md

truenas-vm-helper

Helper script to create VM on TrueNAS SCALE and Proxmox VE using cloud-init with Debian/Ubuntu cloud images, thanks to Setting up a VM on TrueNAS Scale using cloud-init and Proxmox Wiki - Cloud-Init Support.

Quick start

# git clone the source code
test -d ~/code/github.com/ak1ra-lab || mkdir -p ~/code/github.com/ak1ra-lab
cd ~/code/github.com/ak1ra-lab
git clone https://github.com/ak1ra-lab/truenas-vm-helper.git
cd ~/code/github.com/ak1ra-lab/truenas-vm-helper

# Optional, create a file ending with .env.sh suffix to override the default environment variables in the script
cat > vm-create.env.sh<<'EOF'
vm_storage=apps
zfs_mountpoint=/mnt/
vm_seed_dir=${zfs_mountpoint}${vm_storage}/vm/seed
vm_images_dir=${zfs_mountpoint}${vm_storage}/vm/images
add_nic_0=true
nic_0_name=br0
add_nic_1=false
nic_1_name=br1
EOF

cat > qm-get.env.sh<<'EOF'
vm_storage=apps
zfs_mountpoint=/
vm_image_dir=${zfs_mountpoint}${vm_storage}/vm/images
EOF

cat > qm-template.env.sh<<'EOF'
vm_storage=apps
zfs_mountpoint=/
vm_image_dir=${zfs_mountpoint}${vm_storage}/vm/images
EOF

---

How to use cloud-init in NoCloud DataSource?

The data source NoCloud allows the user to provide user-data and meta-data to the instance without running a network service (or even without having a network at all).

You can provide meta-data and user-data to a local vm boot via files on a vfat or iso9660 filesystem. The filesystem volume label must be cidata or CIDATA.

The basic process is,

• Write user-data and meta-data files according to the cloud-init documentation.
  • Note that different versions of cloud-init are installed on different distributions.
• Use genisoimage to package the two files into seed.iso.
  • genisoimage -output seed.iso -input-charset utf8 -volid CIDATA -joliet -rock user-data meta-data
  • TrueNAS SCALE does not have genisoimage installed, if you want to use genisoimage on TrueNAS, you may need to break the TrueNAS system dependency
  • This script creates a small vfat filesystem (~2 MiB), mounts it and copies user-data and meta-data into it
• Create a virtual machine, download the cloud images .raw format dd to the virtual machine DISK.
  • Debian cloud images downloads a .tar.xz image, which is decompressed into .raw format.
  • Ubuntu cloud images .img format is actually .qcow2 format, you need to use qemu-img convert to convert the format.
    • qemu-img convert -O raw input.img output.raw
• Mount seed.iso on the CDROM device of the VM.