[SOLVED] Migrating Proxmox Container to Google Cloud Platform

[earthian]

Hello,

Are there any tools, procedures to easily migrate a bunch of Proxmox containers to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) VMs?

For example:
- I have a container which has 20GB storage disk (thin-lvm), has Debian OS and has setup services and apps running on it.
- I have a similarly sized VM on GCP with 20GB storage disk attached.

How would you suggest to get everything from the container to GCP VM as-is so that the app would not notice where it is running.

Or is this a manual work to set everything up again from new and do manual migration of configs, files, data, etc., etc...

Kind Regards
Andrius

 

[BobhWasatch]

You are migrating from a container to a VM. Containers don't have a kernel, initramdisk, or boot loader and their networking is tied in with PVE. It isn't really possible to directly migrate and I don't know of any pre-done tools.

Unless somebody else has a good idea you will need to set up the VM and then copy over your data. A tool like rsync may be helpful for this.

 

[earthian]

Hello everybody,

I would like to update and set this as solved. And here is the story:

First of all I decided the easiest and fastest way to migrate would be to use Proxmox in GCP too and it was a really straight forward and easy path:

1) start an instance with Debian Bookworm (I chose n2d with 4 CPUs and 16GB RAM, 40 GB root disk)
2) add Proxmox repositories
3) Install Proxmox (check manuals for v8.x on Debian)
4) create a Linux Bridge without any devices (host-only networking)
5) add additional disk storage (in my case 300 GB SSD disk) for container filesystems
6) add iptable rules to the bridge post-up and post-down as provided in the Proxmox docs
7) installed nginx for proxying containers on host (GCP VM)
8) installed certbot on host for SSL certificates for nginx

Done!

I know GCP has support for Docker out of the box, but LXC is not Docker and porting to Docker takes much more time than the above 8 steps.

Cons:
- Proxmox uses around 1 GB extra RAM compared to vanilla Debian

Pros:
- Nice web UI for container management
- Migration of containers from on-prem Proxmox takes around 30 minutes counting in backing up, transfer of the backup over the network and restoration
- Add future flexibility to add more containers (e.g. testing or staging environments, own backup solutions, etc.)