Migrating an installation

[irrelevant]

Hi!
I'm currently looking at Proxmox as an alternative to ESXi. I use the latter on the free tier, and whilst it's served me well, given VMWare's current issues, I'm looking at something new.

I currently run two physical servers, one "production" and one "test", although it's probably a bit presumptuous of me to describe them so - I'm just a techy home user whom wants to keep his hand in during semi-retirement... Both are Gen 11 Dell poweredge rack servers, slightly over ten years old. Neither is top spec in modern terms, but are more than powerful enough for the uses they get put to. Prod is an R815 and by far the better spec - more CPU cores and much more RAM, and runs a selection of VMs that handle several websites, minecraft servers, other game stuff, DNS etc., As many of these are public facing (albeit not high traffic) I try to keep downtime to a minimum. Test is an R610 and spends most of it's time turned off, but is technically play area.

My question is .... If I install Proxmox VE on the R610, configure it up, and move some VMs across, would there be any issue simply swapping all drives and media over between the machines once I'm happy it will work? There is an obvious differences in the number and type of processors, and the amount of RAM, but I'm not sure what else might be impacted. Does installation customise itself for the specific hardware, basically?

Failing that, if I have to reinstall on the R815, can I just move the data drives across and have it import the VMs held on them without needing to backup/restore ?

Thanks

 

[Dunuin]

Hi!
I'm currently looking at Proxmox as an alternative to ESXi. I use the latter on the free tier, and whilst it's served me well, given VMWare's current issues, I'm looking at something new.

I currently run two physical servers, one "production" and one "test", although it's probably a bit presumptuous of me to describe them so - I'm just a techy home user whom wants to keep his hand in during semi-retirement... Both are Gen 11 Dell poweredge rack servers, slightly over ten years old. Neither is top spec in modern terms, but are more than powerful enough for the uses they get put to. Prod is an R815 and by far the better spec - more CPU cores and much more RAM, and runs a selection of VMs that handle several websites, minecraft servers, other game stuff, DNS etc., As many of these are public facing (albeit not high traffic) I try to keep downtime to a minimum. Test is an R610 and spends most of it's time turned off, but is technically play area.

My question is .... If I install Proxmox VE on the R610, configure it up, and move some VMs across, would there be any issue simply swapping all drives and media over between the machines once I'm happy it will work? There is an obvious differences in the number and type of processors, and the amount of RAM, but I'm not sure what else might be impacted. Does installation customise itself for the specific hardware, basically?

You will probably need to edit some config files like /etc/network/interfaces because your NIC names might change and so on. And switching between UEFI and BIOS (grub and systemd-boot) could be a problem. And you might not want to choose "host" as your VMs CPU type, even if you loose some performance then.

Failing that, if I have to reinstall on the R815, can I just move the data drives across and have it import the VMs held on them without needing to backup/restore ?

If and how totally depends on the underlaying storage you are using. Wouldn't for example be a problem with ZFS (just a zpool import YourPool and then adding the pool as a new storage via the webUI) as long as you also move your VM/LXC config files ("/etc/pve/lxc/" and "/etc/pve/qemu-server") between the PVE nodes.

 

[irrelevant]

Thanks, that sounds like it shouldn't be too much trouble, whichever way I do it...