Best Practices for Environment Upgrade

[pietroaretino]

Hello, I was wondering if anyone could give me their recommendation or suggestion on how best to proceed with my current PVE and PBS and PMG upgrade.

I finally have had the budget passed to purchase two new servers so that I can proceed with creating a cluster and quorum in my proxmox environment.

I figured this would be an opportune moment to install and start with PVE 8.0.3

However my original PVE server is still at PVE 6.4-15, my PBS is at 2.2-1 and my PMG is at 7.0-6

My PBS is backing up my VMs and LXCs from my PVE 6.4-15 and my PMG.

My goal was to have 3 physical servers running PVE 8.0.3 and upgrading my backup server to PBS 3.0 and my Mail Gateway to 7.3.

How should I go about this?

My current plan was to:

1. Run primary backup of VMs and LXCs to my PBS 2.2-1 and secondary backup via VEEAM to NAS.
2. Clean / Fresh install of PVE 8 on server running 6.4-15
3. Install PVE 8 on other two physical servers
4. Create cluster and quorum between the three PVE 8 nodes
5. Restore LXCs and VMs to primary node now running PVE 8
   1. Run test on VMs and LXCs ensure everything is looking good
6. Fresh install of PBS 3 on PBS running 2.2-1
7. Configure PVE cluster to backup to PBS 3
8. In place upgrade of PMG VM from 7.0-6 to PMG 7.3
9. Run backups of all VMs and LXCs to new PBS 3
10. Pop a bottle of prosecco and celebrate?

My current worries are:

Based on what I read I would imagine trying to do an in-place upgrade of my PVE 6.4-15 to PVE 8.0.3 is simply not worth it.

If I do a clean install of PVE 8 will I be able to recover my VMs and LXCs from my PBS that is running 2.2-1?

Would the VMs and LXCs be compatible with PVE 8 seeing as they were running on a PVE 6.4-15 environment?

Is an in-place upgrade of PMG 7.0-6 to 7.3 worth it or should I also do a fresh install and then restore configuration from PBS backup?

If all three are configured with hardware RAID and LVMs is replication possible via all 3 nodes in the cluster?

Any tips, tricks or recommendations would be much appreciated.

Thank you kindly for your time.

 

[Dunuin]

If I do a clean install of PVE 8 will I be able to recover my VMs and LXCs from my PBS that is running 2.2-1?

Yes, worked fine here restoring from PBS2 to PVE8.

Would the VMs and LXCs be compatible with PVE 8 seeing as they were running on a PVE 6.4-15 environment?

Usually they should. But have a look at the PVE roadmap for a changelog and known problems. PVE7 for example dropped support for cgroup LXCs, so very old LXC that don't support cgroup2 won't be able to run without workarounds. And you might need to reconfigure the network interfaces of your Windows VMs:
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Roadmap#Release_History

If all three are configured with hardware RAID and LVMs is replication possible via all 3 nodes in the cluster?

Replication requires ZFS and ZFS shouldn't be used on top of HW raid controllers:
https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Performance and Tuning/Hardware.html#hardware-raid-controllers

Is an in-place upgrade of PMG 7.0-6 to 7.3 worth it or should I also do a fresh install and then restore configuration from PBS backup?

Not sure about PMG, but with PVE/PBS minor version upgrades are very easy.

 

[pietroaretino]

Yes, worked fine here restoring from PBS2 to PVE8.


Usually they should. But have a look at the PVE roadmap for a changelog and known problems. PVE7 for example dropped support for cgroup LXCs, so very old LXC that don't support cgroup2 won't be able to run without workarounds. And you might need to reconfigure the network interfaces of your Windows VMs:
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Roadmap#Release_History



Replication requires ZFS and ZFS shouldn't be used on top of HW raid controllers:
https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Performance and Tuning/Hardware.html#hardware-raid-controllers


Not sure about PMG, but with PVE/PBS minor version upgrades are very easy.

Thank you sir. I had in fact read that setting up ZFS ontop of a HW RAID is a bad idea. That is fine, although replication would have been sweet, I am more than content being able to pass VMs and LXCs around via the PBS. Thank you again for your input.