Quick deployment of Debian cloud image in Proxmox with cloud-init
Introduction
This post demonstrates how to quickly create and afterwards clone virtual machine in Proxmox using Debian cloud image. When not using cloud image, more time must be spent after cloning virtual machine: you need to recreate SSH keys (cloning virtual machine doesn't change host SSH keys and that can cause problems with SSH connection to VMs cloned from same template machine), create new user with SSH access, change partition size when you resize disk in Proxmox, set hostname. All of this can be easily achieved with Debian cloud image because it is using cloud-init and Proxmox has built in support for it. This instruction is for creating virtual machine from cloud image on Proxmox with ZFS filesystem.
Software used: Proxmox 8, Debian 12 cloud image