Reprovisioning VMs from template

Support
1

Hey everyone,

for some very specific use-cases, we recently setup image based provisioning for VMWare systems, cloning them from a VMWare template and setting them up with user data templates.
Just now we found out that re-provisioning of systems deployed this way was not possible in the way we are used to from PXE installations (simply clicking build and sending the system back to the installation process), since the build button is grayed out and not clickable. I am aware of the fact that reinstallaing the OS is not possible in the same way for image based VMs, but I would have expected some sort of “delete VM and clone again” to happen.
Is there any other way we can achieve a simmilar result for image based VMs without having to delete the foreman host profile as well?

Regards

2

Nothing I am aware of. I am not sure if hosts even track their “parent” or “source” hosts/images, once a new VM is spawned it lives its own life. Definitely a nice feature it would be but unsure if we ever get to implementing this.

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3

Thank you for you insight about this. I was unable to get around and and leave a reply, but I did get your answer.
Maybe a possible solution (if anyone ever wants to implement something like this) would be to just let the user select a new image file for redeployment, but that’s just a quick idea I had when pondering this.

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