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        <title>Schedule Proxmox VM Startup and Shutdown with Cron</title>
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            <h1>Schedule Proxmox VM Startup and Shutdown with Cron</h1>
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          <h2>What is Cron?</h2>

<blockquote><em>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. -<a href="https://packages.debian.org/stable/cron" target="_blank">https://packages.debian.org/stable/cron</a></em></blockquote>

<ol>
	<li>Log into Proxmox VE either via SSH or the web based shell</li>
	<li>Run the following commands in the terminal
	<div class="codeBlock"># verify the location of qm<br />
	# should output /usr/sbin/qm<br />
	which qm<br />
	# list the configured vms<br />
	qm list</div>
	</li>
	<li>Note the VMID of the target VM(s)</li>
	<li>Determine the startup and shutdown schedule requirements for each target VM</li>
	<li>Convert the startup and shutdown schedules to cron format, <a href="https://crontab.guru/" style="font-size: inherit; vertical-align: unset;" target="_blank">https://crontab.guru/</a> is a great utility to visualize them</li>
	<li>Continue with the following commands in the terminal
	<div class="codeBlock"># edit the cron table file<br />
	crontab -e<br />
	# if prompted, select nano from the list of editors</div>
	</li>
	<li>At the bottom of the file, add an entry for the start and stop of each target VM in the following format
	<p>&lt;%cron schedule%&gt; /usr/sbin/qm &lt;%start|shutdown%&gt; &lt;%VMID%&gt;<br />
	55 6 * * * /usr/sbin/qm start 100<br />
	5 23 * * * /usr/sbin/qm shutdown 100</p>
	</li>
	<li>Press CTRL+O, Enter, CTRL+X to write the changes and close nano</li>
	<li>In the example above, VM 100 will be started at 6:55 AM and shutdown at 11:05 PM everyday</li>
	<li>Cron schedules can be extremely flexible with some creativity, some examples:
	<p><a href="https://crontab.guru/#55_6_*_*_1-5" style="font-size: inherit;" target="_blank">6:55 AM only on weekdays</a><br />
	55 6 * * 1-5 /usr/sbin/qm start 100<br />
	<a href="https://crontab.guru/#0_9_*_*_6,0" style="font-size: inherit;" target="_blank">9:00 AM only on weekends</a><br />
	0 9 * * 6,0 /usr/sbin/qm start 100<br />
	<a href="https://crontab.guru/#0_7_*_*_1,3,5" style="font-size: inherit;" target="_blank">7:00 AM only on Monday, Wednesday and Friday</a><br />
	0 7 * * 1,3,5 /usr/sbin/qm start 100</p>
	</li>
	<li>Linux Containers (lxc) can be controlled via the pct command
	<p>55 6 * * 1-5 /usr/sbin/pct start 103<br />
	0 9 * * 6,0 /usr/sbin/pct start 103<br />
	0 7 * * 1,3,5 /usr/sbin/pct start 103</p>
	</li>
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