Posted here and to r/proxmox:
I have run the main server in my house on a bare-metal Rocky Linux (RL) (and previously RHEL) for several years. While it has been ultra-reliable, there have always been two issues: OS upgrades and backups.
In addition to RL 9, the existing server runs a couple of VMs (using Virtual Box).
RL 10 just came out. Unfortunately, the only migration path from RL 9 is a full reinstall. Plus, given that my RL 9 server hardware is a bit aged, I thought that this was an opportunity to do a fresh install of RL 10 on new hardware without disrupting the existing RL 9 server for the several days the reconfiguration would take (and during which time my local network would be largely down without the server running).
I decided instead of a bare-metal install of RL 10, I would try Proxmox with an RL 10 VM. Given that my existing server was still running, I was under no time pressure to learn Proxmox and get everything working.
The install of Proxmox itself was very simple.
As mentioned above, one of my bugaboos with the existing setup was OS upgrades. Every time a new release of RL came out, I would hold my breath while dnf upgrade did its magic and hope that the machine rebooted fine. Once, it did not, and it took me a while to recover.
I was very intrigued by having a Proxmox Backup Server running too. So in addition to my new server hardware (a SuperMicro 1U server with dual Platinum Xeons) I bought a $100 used HP mini from eBay, attached an external USB drive I had lying around, and installed PBS.
Then I installed RL 10 as a VM under PVE. I had lots of notes and backups of config files from when I installed RL 9, so the process wasn't that difficult. Largest problem I had was that sendmail configuration changed and my old sendmail configuration didn't work, and it took me a couple hours to figure out what changes I needed to make. Next, the nifty part that inspired me to adopt this new strategy. The PVE/PBM combo allows me to to very easily make backups and snapshots of the RL 10 VM. So now I will have no fear of OS upgrades - simply snapshot before the upgrade and revert if there is a problem.
BTW, do people prefer backups or snapshots to PBS? Pros and cons? And what is the difference between a backup initiated from Datacenter/Backup (where I can schedule backups) and a backup initiated from pve/VMName (where I can't schedule backups)?
At various times on the old RL 9 server, I used combinations of Timeshift, veeam, borg, Rear, mondo, and even dd for backups, without ever really settling on a solution I liked that was both performant in creating backups and easy to use for restores. I am thrilled with the ease of backups and restores under PVE/PBS.
Next, instead of installing VirtualBox under my new RL 10 VM, I decided to migrate the VMs from VirtualBox to Proxmox. VirtualBox has an export function that made this almost trivial, and with minor tweaks the VirtualBox VMs were very quickly running under Proxmox. And now I can easily back up those VMs without dealing with the hassle of manually backing up VirtualBox VDIs.
Today, I turned off the old server and easily migrated all clients to the new Proxmox VMs. Most of the switchover was accomplished by simply changing DNS records so that (for example) my mail server was pointed to the new Proxmox RL 10 VM instead of the old bare-metal RL 9. Because some network devices used hardcoded IP references instead of DNS references (stupid, I know) I just switched the Proxmox RL 10 VM to have the same IP the old bare-metal RL 9 server had. Once I remembered to flush DNS on network devices, everything immediately worked.
The whole process was much smoother than anticipated. On the new server, I configured the proxmox install disk across two NVME M.2 drives in a ZFS mirror. I configured the proxmox VM storage disk as two larger SAS SSD, again in a ZFS mirror. So now, not only do I have easy-to-restore backups, but if I suffer a disk death it will be a simple matter to replace the drive and rebuild the mirror and I expect to suffer no down time unless the server hardware itself dies.
Along the way, I also discovered the excellent proxmox-backup package, so now even the Proxmox hypervisor itself should be easy to restore in event of a failure.
Overall, I am an extremely happy camper. Many kudos to the Proxmox development team for excellent work on an extremely useful product. I've written all this up not only to thank the Proxmox team, but also in case it inspires someone else to take a similar path.
Only downside I've encountered so far is that on very day (!) I migrated to this new Proxmox setup, Proxmox 9.0 was released. So I may need to chance an upgrade soon. Perhaps now that my old RL 9 server is no longer performing a useful function, I'll install Proxmox on that, copy my Proxmox config over, and do the Proxmox 9.0 upgrade there first to see how it goes.
I have run the main server in my house on a bare-metal Rocky Linux (RL) (and previously RHEL) for several years. While it has been ultra-reliable, there have always been two issues: OS upgrades and backups.
In addition to RL 9, the existing server runs a couple of VMs (using Virtual Box).
RL 10 just came out. Unfortunately, the only migration path from RL 9 is a full reinstall. Plus, given that my RL 9 server hardware is a bit aged, I thought that this was an opportunity to do a fresh install of RL 10 on new hardware without disrupting the existing RL 9 server for the several days the reconfiguration would take (and during which time my local network would be largely down without the server running).
I decided instead of a bare-metal install of RL 10, I would try Proxmox with an RL 10 VM. Given that my existing server was still running, I was under no time pressure to learn Proxmox and get everything working.
The install of Proxmox itself was very simple.
As mentioned above, one of my bugaboos with the existing setup was OS upgrades. Every time a new release of RL came out, I would hold my breath while dnf upgrade did its magic and hope that the machine rebooted fine. Once, it did not, and it took me a while to recover.
I was very intrigued by having a Proxmox Backup Server running too. So in addition to my new server hardware (a SuperMicro 1U server with dual Platinum Xeons) I bought a $100 used HP mini from eBay, attached an external USB drive I had lying around, and installed PBS.
Then I installed RL 10 as a VM under PVE. I had lots of notes and backups of config files from when I installed RL 9, so the process wasn't that difficult. Largest problem I had was that sendmail configuration changed and my old sendmail configuration didn't work, and it took me a couple hours to figure out what changes I needed to make. Next, the nifty part that inspired me to adopt this new strategy. The PVE/PBM combo allows me to to very easily make backups and snapshots of the RL 10 VM. So now I will have no fear of OS upgrades - simply snapshot before the upgrade and revert if there is a problem.
BTW, do people prefer backups or snapshots to PBS? Pros and cons? And what is the difference between a backup initiated from Datacenter/Backup (where I can schedule backups) and a backup initiated from pve/VMName (where I can't schedule backups)?
At various times on the old RL 9 server, I used combinations of Timeshift, veeam, borg, Rear, mondo, and even dd for backups, without ever really settling on a solution I liked that was both performant in creating backups and easy to use for restores. I am thrilled with the ease of backups and restores under PVE/PBS.
Next, instead of installing VirtualBox under my new RL 10 VM, I decided to migrate the VMs from VirtualBox to Proxmox. VirtualBox has an export function that made this almost trivial, and with minor tweaks the VirtualBox VMs were very quickly running under Proxmox. And now I can easily back up those VMs without dealing with the hassle of manually backing up VirtualBox VDIs.
Today, I turned off the old server and easily migrated all clients to the new Proxmox VMs. Most of the switchover was accomplished by simply changing DNS records so that (for example) my mail server was pointed to the new Proxmox RL 10 VM instead of the old bare-metal RL 9. Because some network devices used hardcoded IP references instead of DNS references (stupid, I know) I just switched the Proxmox RL 10 VM to have the same IP the old bare-metal RL 9 server had. Once I remembered to flush DNS on network devices, everything immediately worked.
The whole process was much smoother than anticipated. On the new server, I configured the proxmox install disk across two NVME M.2 drives in a ZFS mirror. I configured the proxmox VM storage disk as two larger SAS SSD, again in a ZFS mirror. So now, not only do I have easy-to-restore backups, but if I suffer a disk death it will be a simple matter to replace the drive and rebuild the mirror and I expect to suffer no down time unless the server hardware itself dies.
Along the way, I also discovered the excellent proxmox-backup package, so now even the Proxmox hypervisor itself should be easy to restore in event of a failure.
Overall, I am an extremely happy camper. Many kudos to the Proxmox development team for excellent work on an extremely useful product. I've written all this up not only to thank the Proxmox team, but also in case it inspires someone else to take a similar path.
Only downside I've encountered so far is that on very day (!) I migrated to this new Proxmox setup, Proxmox 9.0 was released. So I may need to chance an upgrade soon. Perhaps now that my old RL 9 server is no longer performing a useful function, I'll install Proxmox on that, copy my Proxmox config over, and do the Proxmox 9.0 upgrade there first to see how it goes.
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