How can I migrate a node and it's VMs to another PVE instance on a different system

[sevensz]

This is my first major project doing anything like this so it's all very new to me still. It's been a bit of a trial by fire and a lot of learning as I go so forgive me if I'm misinterpreting anything.

I've been working solo on developing a solution for hosting VMs loaded with our SDK of industry automation software for users to access remotely. I've been doing this with PVE on my home network with the goal of having a working system to migrate to our main on-site server when it's ready.

Within my PVE instance I've got 1 datacentre with 1 host node running x5 VMs: x1 LXC running haproxy & f2b acting as the frontend, & x4 ubuntu VMs in a docker swarm (1 manager, 3 workers).

What would be the best way to go about doing this? My fall-back solution is to package all the backups of the aforementioned node/VMs and manually restore and reconfigure them 1 by 1, but ideally I would like to be able to package the whole host node and restore that.

Thanks

 

[Chris]

Hi,
this depends on how heavily you customized the host. But in general backup/restore of the VMs should be a rather straight forward way to achieve this. If you connect both hosts to a shared backup storage, you can easily do this via the WebUI.

Another option would be to create a full disk clone of your Proxmox VE installation and move this to the other host. What filesystem are you using? If it is a ZFS, you might even do a ZFS send/receive.

 

[sevensz]

I haven't made any significant changes to the host other than setting a static ip and changing the SSH port but I don't foresee either of those to be barriers to what I'm trying to do here.

A shared backup might be tricky because of some security policies at the office, but I am using ZFS so I'll have to start looking into that solution.

Thanks!

 

[Chris]

A shared backup might be tricky because of some security policies at the office

This was just a suggestion to make your task easier. You can also create VMA backups to a local storage and copy the files from there to any medium to transport them to the other host.

 

[Dunuin]

I haven't made any significant changes to the host other than setting a static ip and changing the SSH port but I don't foresee either of those to be barriers to what I'm trying to do here.

Then you could backup the /etc/network/interfaces, /etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/ssh/sshd.conf as well as the config.db storing the PVE configs that gets mounted at /etc/pve: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Proxmox_Cluster_File_System_(pmxcfs)#_recovery