Import older VM to 8.x?

[acfreema]

First off, I haven't done much with moving VMs in Proxmox, so please excuse the beginner value of my question. If this has already been asked, could someone point me to a thread about it? I couldn't find one that addresses this particular situation.

We have an old cluster running 6.2, and we are preparing to replace it with newer hardware running 8.x. At a glance, is it obvious that making backups of the older version VMs, and then restoring them in 8.x will be possible with minimal risk?

 

[david_tao]

Hi acfreema:
For safty, you can do the VM backup from PVE 6.2 cluster and then transfer the backup file (gzip or gzip) into your new PVE 8 cluster then restore it. That method will cause longer downtime because your VM will required be shut down before backup begin and start after restore end. This method is recommended if your old 6.2 hosts and new 8.x hosts have different CPU manufacturer.
For quickly. You can join three PVE 8 hosts into current PVE 6.2 cluster and then use offline migrate (shutdown > migrate > startup) move VM into new PVE 8 hosts, then remove old PVE 6.2 hosts from cluster. recommend using offline migrate is I think your old 6.2 host and new 8.x host may have different CPU generation, but all of them are belongs to same CPU manufacturer (them all is Intel either AMD).

 

[acfreema]

Thank you for those ideas.
I am glad to learn the restore function will work from an older version to a newer one.