Migrating PVE install from flash to NVMe

[unsichtbarre]

I did an install where one host of a three host cluster had a dead RAID controller. To reach quorum, I went ahead and installed PVE to a flash drive and joined the cluster for HA failover capacity, however no VMs on that host.

This is a three-host cluster with iSCSI storage.

Now the RAID controller is replaced and I want to move the PVE install from flash to RAID/NVMe. In my mind:

1. Download /etc
2. Remove flash media
3. Re-install PVE to RAID
4. Upload /etc to new install
5. Reboot

Am I missing anything?

THX,
-JB

 

[psalkiewicz]

Hi,

Copying manually /etc is not a good option. Long story short there are too many moving parts to make it succesful. Much better way is to move the whole filesystem from flash to nvme using software like Clonezilla.

 

[Johannes S]

Another option would be to copy /etc/pve from a zfs or lvm snapshot.

 

[UdoB]

Another option would be to copy /etc/pve from a zfs or lvm snapshot.

Did you test that? I know that you know that pve is a fuse-mounted database; a snapshot of the "/"-filesystem is... empty:

~# ls -Al /.zfs/snapshot/manual/etc/ | grep pve;  echo "inside pve:"; ls -Al /.zfs/snapshot/manual/etc/pve/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root   root       2 Aug 26  2023 pve
inside pve:
total 0

I can only test with ZFS, but I'm fairly sure the same is true for LVM.


Edit: reading the other posts again I probably missed the point. I'll leave it here nevertheless...

 

[Johannes S]

Did you test that? I know that you know that pve is a fuse-mounted database; a snapshot of the "/"-filesystem is... empty:

Now I feel stupid to miss that. But for the regular /etc/ directory (which OP also wants to backup if I didn't miss something) snapshots would work fine. And for /etc/pve consistency isn't that much of an issue like with the remainder of /etc.
For the goals of the OP I would backup /etc from a snapshot, /etc/pve and (just for good measure /var/lib/pve-cluster (again from a snapshot), since it contains the sqlite database used for the fuse pmcxfs