How do I migrate host to a different Motherboard/CPU?

[justjosh]

Hello,

Currently my host is on dual Intel Xeon E5-2670 + X9DRi-F. I wish to migrate to EPYC 7401P + EPYCD8-2T.

Can I just power down and swap out the motherboard/cpu or do I need to do some sort of backup/restore?

Host currently has 2 ZFS pools on it. Do I need to export/import them?

Thank you.

 

[Dunuin]

Hello,

Currently my host is on dual Intel Xeon E5-2670 + X9DRi-F. I wish to migrate to EPYC 7401P + EPYCD8-2T.

Can I just power down and swap out the motherboard/cpu or do I need to do some sort of backup/restore?

ZFS pools shouldn't be a big problem. VMs could be problematic if you are not using the "kvm64" CPU type and for example set it to "host" or a specific architecture but then running them on another host that is using another CPU architecture.
And I think it depends on the guest OS too. When I install a Debian I can choose if I want the complete kernel with all drivers or just the drivers for the found hardware. This also could be problematic if running on another host that uses other hardware with other drivers. Especially if you passthrough stuff.
I would atleast backup all VMs and the "/etc/pve" folder first.

Host currently has 2 ZFS pools on it. Do I need to export/import them?

ZFS got a command to export pools but you would need to disable the corresponding storage in proxmox first or proxmox will automatically import it again within seconds.

 

[jasonsansone]

I have migrated the ZFS mirrored boot SSD's from a Supermicro X9 system to an X10 system previously. It is smooth sailing with the obvious exception being that you should expect all networking to be broken on first boot. You will need to use the IPMI/BMC console to edit your /etc/networking/interfaces file to match the now changed interface names.

 

[justjosh]

ZFS pools shouldn't be a big problem. VMs could be problematic if you are not using the "kvm64" CPU type and for example set it to "host" or a specific architecture but then running them on another host that is using another CPU architecture.
And I think it depends on the guest OS too. When I install a Debian I can choose if I want the complete kernel with all drivers or just the drivers for the found hardware. This also could be problematic if running on another host that uses other hardware with other drivers. Especially if you passthrough stuff.
I would atleast backup all VMs and the "/etc/pve" folder first.

ZFS got a command to export pools but you would need to disable the corresponding storage in proxmox first or proxmox will automatically import it again within seconds.

Is the host OS portable just by switching the mobos?

There's only one VM on the host, the rest are Turnkey LXCs (Debian based). For the non-Debian, they are Ubuntu. I don't recall having any options for kernel. I believe the VM uses kvm64 for the CPU type and i440fx for the chipset.

Is it possible to do a full backup of the host including pool data that I can easily revert to if anything goes wrong?

 

[Dunuin]

No

Is it possible to do a full backup of the host including pool data that I can easily revert to if anything goes wrong?

Not using PVE itself. Thats a feature that is worked on for the PBS but it isn't finished.
But you could boot from a usb stick into clonezilla and create a block level backup of your complete system drives. So that if something really goes wrong you are always able to restore the complete system disks from the backup.

 

[justjosh]

No

Not using PVE itself. Thats a feature that is worked on for the PBS but it isn't finished.
But you could boot from a usb stick into clonezilla and create a block level backup of your complete system drives. So that if something really goes wrong you are always able to restore the complete system disks from the backup.

My system disks are currently in ZFS Mirror. Good idea to just plug one of them out as a backup and stick it back in for resilvering once everything is confirmed to work?