Temporarily moving all VM data to another machine & back

[starkruzr]

So, in my haste to set up my environment (and a desire for lots of fast storage), I put my PVE lab on a RAID0 array. Yes, yes, I know, this was dumb. In my defense, I am actually dumb, and also it's only two 2TB drives, so the chances of a catastrophic failure are still pretty low. At some point soon (probably after Christmas), I'd like to buy two new 2TB drives and convert this array to a RAID10, which strikes me (and probably you) as much more sensible and fault-tolerant.

Great. Only one problem: my LSI MegaRAID 9260-4i RAID controller doesn't seem to be able to add drives to an existing volume group. This seems to indicate I am going to have to start all over again with my PVE environment.

So I am curious how one would go about the process of copying one's VMs over to another machine (they're not THAT big, this would be approximately 200GB of data total), redoing your PVE server, and then copying them all back and having them pop back up where they were before. Is this a crazy idea or is it done on a semi-regular basis?

Possible added wrinkle: this machine WAS the second node of a two-node cluster, before. I have since decommissioned that cluster and it is a standalone node again, although from what I understand there are little bits of cluster-ness that stick around after you decommission that could cause problems.

Ideas?

 

[m.ardito]

what about adding another node, live migrating all vms and cts there, then reset from scratch the first node, make it join the cluster again, and then live migrating back what you need? this is one of the main purposes of having a cluster, btw.

just remember the word "quorum" along your path... and read the wiki about cluster nodes operations...

Marco

 

[starkruzr]

what about adding another node, live migrating all vms and cts there, then reset from scratch the first node, make it join the cluster again, and then live migrating back what you need? this is one of the main purposes of having a cluster, btw.

just remember the word "quorum" along your path... and read the wiki about cluster nodes operations...

Marco

I thought about this, but worry that having had this current node once be "node #2" of a two node cluster in the past might cause problems. I don't think cluster configs are completely cleanly removed using the documented method for decommissioning a cluster.

 

[m.ardito]

afaik, if you correctly removed other nodes from the cluster, a new node should join without troubles.
anyway, if you step into troubles, there is always a way to turn the cluster working right, it just depends on the troubles... it could depend on the whole history of your cluster, but usually ther eis a way to get it right.

otherwise, you'll need a full vm/ct backup, reinstall that node from scratch and then restore.

Marco