Schedule Proxmox VM Startup and Shutdown with Cron

#Proxmox #Scheduling #CRON

Full steps can be found at https://i12bretro.github.io/tutorials/0849.html

What is Cron?

The cron daemon is a background process that runs particular programs at particular times (for example, every minute, day, week, or month), as specified in a crontab. By default, users may also create crontabs of their own so that processes are run on their behalf. - https://packages.debian.org/stable/cron      01. Log into Proxmox VE either via SSH or the web based shell    02. Run the following commands in the terminal          # verify the location of qm          # should output /usr/sbin/qm          which qm          # list the configured vms          qm list    03. Note the VMID of the target VM(s)    04. Determine the startup and shutdown schedule requirements for each target VM    05. Convert the startup and shutdown schedules to cron format,  https://crontab.guru/ is a great utility to visualize them    06. Continue with the following commands in the terminal          # edit the cron table file          crontab -e          # if prompted, select nano from the list of editors    07. At the bottom of the file, add an entry for the start and stop of each target VM in the following format          ≪%cron schedule%≫ /usr/sbin/qm ≪%start|shutdown%≫ ≪%VMID%≫          55 6 * * * /usr/sbin/qm start 100          5 23 * * * /usr/sbin/qm shutdown 100    08. Press CTRL+O, Enter, CTRL+X to write the changes and close nano    09. In the example above, VM 100 will be started at 6:55 AM and shutdown at 11:05 PM everyday    10. Cron schedules can be extremely flexible with some creativity, some examples:           https://crontab.guru/#55_6_*_*_1-5          55 6 * * 1-5 /usr/sbin/qm start 100           https://crontab.guru/#0_9_*_*_6,0          0 9 * * 6,0 /usr/sbin/qm start 100           https://crontab.guru/#0_7_*_*_1,3,5          0 7 * * 1,3,5 /usr/sbin/qm start 100    11. Linux Containers (lxc) can be controlled via the pct command          55 6 * * 1-5 /usr/sbin/pct start 103          0 9 * * 6,0 /usr/sbin/pct start 103          0 7 * * 1,3,5 /usr/sbin/pct start 103  

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