The highly useful open-source monitoring system, Centreon, no longer offers an ISO one-click installation package starting from version 21.40 (including version 21.40). Instead, Centreon now provides an online script installation and virtual machine images for VMware or Oracle VirtualBox. In the spirit of open-source and efficient resource utilization, I plan to deploy the Centreon image in VMware VM format to Proxmox VE.

Operating Environment

The platform used is Proxmox VE 8.1.3, with all packages fully updated. Centreon is using the latest released version, 23.10. The downloaded file from the official website is a compressed file named “centreon-vmware-vm-23_10-1.el8.zip”. After extracting the zip file, it generates a single large file with a “.ova” extension (which, after further extraction, results in four files). In contrast, the Centreon 23.04 version extraction generates four files of varying sizes.

Upload the extracted file “centreon-vmware-vm-23_10-1.el8.ova” to the Proxmox VE 8.1 host system running Debian for later use.

Create a Virtual Machine and Process the Image File

Log into the host system Debian 12 (Bookworm) via SSH client or the Proxmox VE 8.1 console. Use the command `tar xvf centreon-vmware-vm-23_10-1.el8.ova` to extract the file, which generates several files. The useful file is “centreon-central-23100-el8-disk1.vmdk”; the other files are text files that you can review if necessary.

Switch to the Proxmox VE 8.1 web management interface, create a virtual machine named “centreon23,” and allocate sufficient hardware resources to it.

The purpose of creating this virtual machine is to use it for converting and attaching the VMware image, as importing the image requires the VM parameter “vmid”.

Switch back to the host system Debian and execute the following operations in sequence:

1) File Format Conversion

Navigate to the directory where the VM image disk file is located, then execute the following command to convert the VMDK format to QCOW2:

qm disk import 104 centreon-central-23100-el8-disk1.vmdk vmdata –format qcow2

During command execution, the conversion progress will be displayed, and the device file associated with the vmid will be created.

In the Proxmox VE 8 web management interface, you can visually see the result of this operation (an unused disk will appear for the virtual machine).

Note that Proxmox VE 8’s host system uses the “disk import” parameter for the `qm` command, not “importdisk” as on other platforms, so make sure to differentiate between them. Additionally, there’s another parameter, “importovf,” which may also convert VMware VM image files, so feel free to try it.

2) Attach the Disk to the Virtual Machine

From any path on the Proxmox VE 8 host system running Debian, execute the following command to attach the image disk generated in the previous step to the virtual machine:

qm set 104 –ide2 vmdata:vm-104-disk-0

After execution, the configuration file “104.conf” of the virtual machine “104” will be updated.

Although the default storage interface for the server is SCSI, if you use the command “qm set –scsi …” to attach the disk, it might succeed, but the restored virtual machine may fail to boot. Therefore, using “–ide” is a safer option.

Start the Virtual Machine System

In the Proxmox VE 8 web management interface, modify the virtual machine boot order and select “ide”.

Click “OK” to save the changes, then start the virtual machine. If everything is correct, you will enter the AlmaLinux 8.0 console login interface for the Centreon host system.

Configure and Run Centreon

Log in to the Centreon 23 host system using the default username “root” and default password “centreon”. The screen will display all subsequent operations, and you can complete the steps as instructed.

To access the recovered VM remotely via a browser, enter the IP address of the VM and log in using the default username “admin” and default password “Centreon!123”.

Compared to version 21 of Centreon, version 23 has undergone significant changes in interface design.

With the ISO installation of Centreon, you would need to manually create database accounts before proceeding with further configuration of the Centreon environment. In contrast, the virtual machine recovery process simplifies this step by automatically creating the database account and checking the runtime environment.

Appendix: Installing Centreon 23 via Command Line

Prepare the latest Linux operating system, Rocky 9, and run the following command to download the installation script “unattended.sh”, which will be saved to the “/tmp” directory:

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/centreon/centreon/23.10.x/centreon/unattended.sh –output /tmp/unattended.sh

Run the downloaded script “unattended.sh” with some necessary parameters and options to install the required components for Centreon:

bash /tmp/unattended.sh install -t central -v 23.10 -r stable -s -l DEBUG 2>&1 | tee -a /tmp/unattended-$(date +”%m-%d-%Y-%H%M%S”).log

The script does not use the “-p” option to specify the password for the Centreon 23 web management super administrator account “admin,” as this will be generated automatically during the installation process.

To install the Centreon Poller using the script, use the same “unattended.sh” script, but replace the parameter “install -t central” with “install -t poller”.