Proxmox: How to delete a template that is linked to VMs [ENG]

Today I planned to update my wordpress alpine lxc template, So I cloned it into a temp VM, edited and updated the VM and wanted to delete the old template and overwrite it with the new, dang… it doesn’t work

Yep I had link-cloned it for another project container, sooo I had to do it the hard way.

How you ask ?

So Proxmox is running on ZFS as the storage driver, to resolve this issue I had to undo all linked references to the parent disk, or zfs volume if you are specific.

So I done it before but had to think twice how to go with it.

You do the following:

1. Go through your VMs/LXC Container and look for a disk reference with a basedisk-xxx reference in it, this shows the reference to the basedisk of your template.
2. Select the Disk
3. Click on Move Disk
4. Select the storage your current disk lies on (no worries, it will move(clone) to a local disk as a full clone)
5. Change the view to the snapshots.
6. Delete all snapshots from the past.
7. Now select the disk from the Resources/Hardware overview and delete the now unused disk with basedisk-xxx/subxxxx

Now you can delete your template and replace it with the new.

Originally published at https://www.pierewoehl.de on December 4, 2020.