I am attempting to move from my VMWare environment to a Proxmox environment. I have been able to successfully "cold" migrate machines from VMWare to Proxmox, but not while "hot". The only live migration tools in Proxmox that do this are ones that power down your source VM, then migrate the disks to the destination. I need the ability to either truly "live/hot migrate" the source to the destination or have something that can "sync" the source and destination on a periodic schedule that then allows me to power off the source at a moments notice, perform one last sync (delta), and then power the machine on in the destination.
The closest thing I have been able to concoct to do this is as follows:
1. Creating the VM in Proxmox with all the hardware settings, disks, sizes, etc.... I require.
2. Booting the VM in Proxmox to a Ubuntu Live .iso and configuring iscsi to present it's disks to my network.
3. Configuring iscsi initiators on my source VM's to connect to the Proxmox disks. (all my VM's are Windows, so this is easily done)
4. Trying to install various disk cloning software such as Macrium, Paragon, EaseUS, AOMEI, etc... on my source VM's and using the "Clone" option to essentially mirror the source disks to the destination disks via iscsi, but this takes A LOT of time and has its own shortcomings.
The issues with the above solution that make this not as ideal are:
1. The "Clone" option with most these software's are limited to one disk at a time. Meaning, if you have many disks to clone, and/or the disks are large in size, you would have to babysit them one-by-one, which will take significantly longer. Example: 10+ VM's, 4-5 disks each, with 1TB used on each.
2. The "Clone" option, although viable, still requires you to clone a 2nd time to somewhat mimic a hot migration. For example. If you clone a disk that takes 10 hours to complete and during that time your data on the source disk has been in use and changing (expected), the 2nd time you try to clone the disk, it's going to take another 10 hours because the cloning technology doesn't have heat mapping to identify only the blocks of data that have changed since the first clone. This still puts me in a situation where it's not technically a "hot" or "live" migration because I would have to stop using the source to clone the data/disk a final time, and even then that makes the process twice as long.
Other solutions:
1. Backup/Restore products. I could purchase a Backup software such as Acronis, StorageCraft, Carbonite, Veeam, etc... and have a backup job that backs up all my source machines every 10 minutes and perform a restore on the destination VM in Proxmox. From there, I could perform a "differential restore" over the top of the first restore - using the newest/latest backup and that would have heat mapping to restore only the small amounts of changes (delta) that have taken place. However, this would require a hell of a lot more storage (to back everything up), possible software costs, local agents to install on all my machines, possible agent troubleshooting over VSS, etc... and those are costs and additions that I don't really need nor want.
2. There was a software company named FalconStor that I used to use 15 years ago at an MSP I worked for, which performed disk level backups of Windows machines to a SAN. It used a locally installed agent named DiskSafe that leveraged Microsoft's iscsi initiator to keep your live OS disk in a constant "sync" with mirrored disks that resided on the SAN. The SAN would then periodically take snapshots of the mirrored disks that sat on it and that was how the backup solution worked. The DiskSafe software was legendary though, because you could basically use it (for free) to sync disks over iscsi to live disks on the same machine and vice versa. They only made you license the backup product on the SAN, so in some cases, we would borrow DiskSafe to live migrate customers data (live syncing) over iscsi when faced like challenges like mine today with Proxmox. However, they discontinued DiskSafe and I can't find a download of it anywhere, so this is no longer an option to bail me out.
Final thoughts:
In light of all the people leaving VMWare (1+ year now), I had hoped that there would be better built-in tool/support for true hot/live migrations to Proxmox. I am a little disappointed for sure, ugh. There are still some ways to still do this, such as leveraging a 3rd party backup software as mentioned above, but that comes with additional adds and costs that I am trying to avoid. I don't expect to do everything for free, but the costs of the storage and the storage being a permanent add (especially for how much I would need) make it not feasible. If anyone has another creative idea, has found a better way to hot/live migrate to Proxmox, or has done this sort of thing before, I would love to hear from you! Thanks in advance for everyone's time and consideration who has taken the time to read this thread!
The closest thing I have been able to concoct to do this is as follows:
1. Creating the VM in Proxmox with all the hardware settings, disks, sizes, etc.... I require.
2. Booting the VM in Proxmox to a Ubuntu Live .iso and configuring iscsi to present it's disks to my network.
3. Configuring iscsi initiators on my source VM's to connect to the Proxmox disks. (all my VM's are Windows, so this is easily done)
4. Trying to install various disk cloning software such as Macrium, Paragon, EaseUS, AOMEI, etc... on my source VM's and using the "Clone" option to essentially mirror the source disks to the destination disks via iscsi, but this takes A LOT of time and has its own shortcomings.
The issues with the above solution that make this not as ideal are:
1. The "Clone" option with most these software's are limited to one disk at a time. Meaning, if you have many disks to clone, and/or the disks are large in size, you would have to babysit them one-by-one, which will take significantly longer. Example: 10+ VM's, 4-5 disks each, with 1TB used on each.
2. The "Clone" option, although viable, still requires you to clone a 2nd time to somewhat mimic a hot migration. For example. If you clone a disk that takes 10 hours to complete and during that time your data on the source disk has been in use and changing (expected), the 2nd time you try to clone the disk, it's going to take another 10 hours because the cloning technology doesn't have heat mapping to identify only the blocks of data that have changed since the first clone. This still puts me in a situation where it's not technically a "hot" or "live" migration because I would have to stop using the source to clone the data/disk a final time, and even then that makes the process twice as long.
Other solutions:
1. Backup/Restore products. I could purchase a Backup software such as Acronis, StorageCraft, Carbonite, Veeam, etc... and have a backup job that backs up all my source machines every 10 minutes and perform a restore on the destination VM in Proxmox. From there, I could perform a "differential restore" over the top of the first restore - using the newest/latest backup and that would have heat mapping to restore only the small amounts of changes (delta) that have taken place. However, this would require a hell of a lot more storage (to back everything up), possible software costs, local agents to install on all my machines, possible agent troubleshooting over VSS, etc... and those are costs and additions that I don't really need nor want.
2. There was a software company named FalconStor that I used to use 15 years ago at an MSP I worked for, which performed disk level backups of Windows machines to a SAN. It used a locally installed agent named DiskSafe that leveraged Microsoft's iscsi initiator to keep your live OS disk in a constant "sync" with mirrored disks that resided on the SAN. The SAN would then periodically take snapshots of the mirrored disks that sat on it and that was how the backup solution worked. The DiskSafe software was legendary though, because you could basically use it (for free) to sync disks over iscsi to live disks on the same machine and vice versa. They only made you license the backup product on the SAN, so in some cases, we would borrow DiskSafe to live migrate customers data (live syncing) over iscsi when faced like challenges like mine today with Proxmox. However, they discontinued DiskSafe and I can't find a download of it anywhere, so this is no longer an option to bail me out.
Final thoughts:
In light of all the people leaving VMWare (1+ year now), I had hoped that there would be better built-in tool/support for true hot/live migrations to Proxmox. I am a little disappointed for sure, ugh. There are still some ways to still do this, such as leveraging a 3rd party backup software as mentioned above, but that comes with additional adds and costs that I am trying to avoid. I don't expect to do everything for free, but the costs of the storage and the storage being a permanent add (especially for how much I would need) make it not feasible. If anyone has another creative idea, has found a better way to hot/live migrate to Proxmox, or has done this sort of thing before, I would love to hear from you! Thanks in advance for everyone's time and consideration who has taken the time to read this thread!
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