Migrating Proxmox (host config itself)

[abbynormal]

I'm in a pickle. I have Proxmox installed on a dell r610 with a single 500GB SSD as the boot drive, and I have a 1TB I'm planning to move it over to. The real kicker is the drive is plugged into the h700 raid controller, and the only way for this controller to use the single drive is to setup a single drive in it's own raid 0 array. And so creates the pickle, as all evidence (and quick light testing) shows that cloning a drive (and expanding it) in such a deployment is a no-go.

So seems I will be rebuilding the Proxmox install. Backing up and restoring the VM/LXCs will be easy, as there is plenty of documentation for that. My concern is the host OS and config itself. I have a handful of pool groups, 10 Linux/OVS bridges, with multiple different vNICs on all the VM/LXCs using numerous different internal/external VLANs over those bridges.

So my question is, is there a process to backup and migrate this data over to the new install, and somehow have it tie into the VM/LXCs as it currently sits? Or am I looking at manually rebuilding all of this?

 

[mailinglists]

There are many ways, some of which are available to you using simple google search, and some are tied to your specific install.
While people might not be inclined to answer topics already answered, I would suggest you at least specify basic info about your PM install.
Like, do you use ZFS (then you can just zfs send) or, do you use LVM? Then you can just tar everything and untar it on new system .. in both cases obviously use a live linux usb key...

 

[abbynormal]

There are many ways, some of which are available to you using simple google search, and some are tied to your specific install.
While people might not be inclined to answer topics already answered, I would suggest you at least specify basic info about your PM install.
Like, do you use ZFS (then you can just zfs send) or, do you use LVM? Then you can just tar everything and untar it on new system .. in both cases obviously use a live linux usb key...

Thanks for the very polite "google search dummy", and I don't disagree with that sentiment. I guess I was just looking for a sanity check for any gotchas. I found this which appears to be simple and promising.

Also glad you mentioned drives, as that brings up another factor that I meant to mention to vet any possible gotchas against. The boot drive uses a LVM partition for all the VM/LXCs. However I also have a RAID5 array in the server that is it's own separate LVM drive in proxmox. The primary purpose for this is a mount point on two containers. I don't plan on touching this array and it will stay in place. So assuming I follow a backup/restore process for the boot drive, I believe the above should bring in that LVM array and it's associations as well?

 

[mailinglists]

Hi,

if you do not touch the RAID array or the LVM data that resides on it, you will be able to access it with new install. Might even work, if you just bring over storage.cfg or whichever file has storages defined. In any case you can activate (vgchange -a y) and ad it manually.

I never used https://dannyda.com/2020/05/28/how-to-backup-proxmox-ve-host/ nor am I familiar with it. My google search brought up sites like these: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/best-practice-for-proxmox-self-backup.38382/ ... https://github.com/DerDanilo/proxmox-stuff/