From ESXI 6.5 to Proxmox - HomeServer - I have questions.

[DobbyNator94]

Hey,

I have the following HomeServer.

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G
ESXi 6.5
16GB RAM
Adaptec 5405 without BBU - RAID 1 (2x 3TB NAS HDD)
256GB NVME
128GB SATA SSD

3 VMs (Nextclooud, Linux VM with Nodered, ioBroker etc, Windows Server)

And now I got 3x 14TB (2x for RAID1, 1x as Backup-Storage --> Proxmox Backup-Server? I also have an Mini-PC with AMD A6-5000 with 8GB RAM, that would be great for that Backup-Server) and want to get rid off the 3TB HDDs.

I also want to switch to Proxmox. I read that there is a Wizard to migrate the ESXi VMs.

But what is the smartest way to do it? Install Proxmox on a second PC and migrate the VMs on that 14TB HDD and after that, deinstall ESXI and install Proxmox on to the HomeServer and insert that HDD and everything works fine? Or is that a lot of hassle?

And also I'm not sure to use my old Adaptec Card with RAID 1 or make an ZFS-Pool and use the SATA from the Mainboard. But I think for RAID 1 the Adaptec is good enough and I don't think I have enough RAM for ZFS.

Would be great if someone can give me a bump into right direction.

Thank you!

best regards,
Robin

 

[jdancer]

I've used the Proxmox ESXi migration tool on production VMs with no issues. You'll need to disable session timeouts on the ESXi host(s). Make sure the VMs are off and NO snapshots.

ZFS works fine on SATA drives. ZFS provides snapshots, rollbacks, compression, and error checking of data and metadata. A win-win-win. ZFS works fine with 8GB RAM (this is on a 14-year old server) but don't recommend it. More is better.