Upgrading PVE 7.4 from Debian 11 (Bullseye) to 12 (Bookworm) possible?

[pschneider1968]

Hi there,

I am currently running PVE 7.4 (Manager version pve-manager/7.4-13/46c37d9c) with Kernel Linux 6.2.11-2-pve on two boxes, one big and one small, in an advanced homelab type of setup. Everything is running great and smoothly, with lots of VM and some LXC containers.

I would like to know whether it is possible, recommend, or supported to upgrade the underlying Debian from 11 to 12 Bookworm, as outline in the Debian release notes? Or will this break things?

I have already updated most of my Debian VMs and LXC containers without any issues so far, and would like to be able to do this also on the Hypervisor host.

One of this hosts I also use as a desktop machine via XRDP, and it works fine. Will an upgrade have any issues here?

Thanks for any input!

Regards
Peter

 

[vesalius]

Why don't you just wait to update to proxmox 8, should not be all that long, a few weeks or so, before it's ready with Bookworm as the base.

 

[leesteken]

Not really, Proxmox major versions are (mostly) linked to Debian major versions. Check you the upcoming PVE 8.0 for more information on Proxmox and Bookworm.

 

[LnxBil]

You can already have a look at the upgrade path, but if it'll break things you changed (e.g. desktop packages) is out of scope.
Why don't you try it out?

 

[pschneider1968]

Yeah, maybe I will just try it and see how far it goes. I think if I make /etc a git repo and push it out somewhere else, and if I have backups of all VMs and containers, I should be safe in case anything goes totally wrong. Correct?

 

[LnxBil]

Yeah, maybe I will just try it and see how far it goes. I think if I make /etc a git repo and push it out somewhere else, and if I have backups of all VMs and containers, I should be safe in case anything goes totally wrong. Correct?

Depending on your time-to-recovery-requirements, yes. I can recommend having ZFS for your root filesystem to have snapshots in order to have a faster recovery time.

 

[pschneider1968]

I don't use ZFS. I have two single 256 GB SSDs for OS and VM OS ISO images, and I have two RAID Arrays, one RAID1 for VM System Disks with two 1 TB SSDs, and one RAID5 for VM Data Disks with six 1TB HDDs on an Adaptec HW RAID controller with BBU, so 4 SSDs and 6 HDDs in total. I/O Performance is nice. On the RAID arrays, I have LVM thin pools.