Building disposable Proxmox VMs from mutable base VMs with ZFS

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When I moved my lab from VMware Workstation to Proxmox VE, one of the first things I missed was linked clones.

In VMware Workstation, I could take a snapshot of a normal VM and create a linked clone from it. The clone was available almost immediately and used very little additional storage at first. It was ideal for disposable test and development environments.

Proxmox VE also supports linked clones, but their source must be a template. That did not fit how I wanted to maintain my base machines. A template cannot be started like a normal VM, so updating it requires a separate workflow.

Writing on Xosé Fernández

Building disposable Proxmox VMs from mutable base VMs with ZFS