Pro Create Image turns an existing virtual machine’s system disk into a reusable image in Image Manager. It is part of the Cloudmin Pro extension; the shared module rejects capture when the extension is absent, including direct API requests.

Capturing an image

Choose Create image from a guest’s action menu or Create Image on Edit Virtual Machine. Enter an image name and a destination file pool (directory, filesystem or NFS), choose whether to remove login credentials for all local accounts, then choose whether to keep the source running with guest-agent preparation or shut it down cleanly before copying. Capture reuses the clone preparation, recovery and isolated guest preparation code, and requires libguestfs with its Perl bindings, YAML::XS 0.69 or later and bsdtar on the host. Host administrator access is required, and read-only sessions cannot submit a capture.

Supported sources

Capture supports one writable Linux system disk using virtio, with working cloud-init and an installation libguestfs can inspect. Cloudmin seed disks are omitted. Additional writable disks, attached installation media and read-only data disks are rejected, as are devices whose state cannot be copied, such as TPMs.

What the image contains

The result is a standalone QCOW2 image, also when the source disk is an LVM logical volume. Capture resets machine identity and cloud-init state, removes cloud-init logs, and replaces copied Virtualmin Pro license credentials with a placeholder. Remove login credentials? defaults to Yes: it clears password hashes, SSH credentials and default shell histories for all local accounts. No preserves those login credentials. Accounts, permissions, applications, data and other secrets remain, so captured images must stay private.

Virtual machines created from a captured image receive fresh host IDs, SSH host keys and access settings before boot, through the same prepared-clone path. Templates can select captured images like any other import.