Move VM to shared storage

[Alessandro 123]

Let's assume a standalone PVE server with no cluster or shared storage.
If I'd like to create a cluster with other 2 PVE servers sharing a Gluster cluster, could I do the following?

- create PVE cluster from node PVE1 (keep in mind that this server is up and running with production VMs, so, no service disruption should happen)
- add node PVE2 and PVE3 to the cluster
- add the Gluster storage as shared storage on each node
- one VM per time, shut it down, move the qcow2 image to the gluster storage, start the VM

Is this ok?

I've seen the "Move disk" option in the Web Interface. Can I use that to move the disk from local storage to shared storage? Seems to also work with VM powerd on. Is possible to have some details ? The wiki page is very very short (https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage_Migration)

If all of these could be done with running VMs and online, would be a very very very very very cool feature.

 

[Belokan]

I've seen the "Move disk" option in the Web Interface. Can I use that to move the disk from local storage to shared storage? Seems to also work with VM powerd on. Is possible to have some details ? The wiki page is very very short (https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage_Migration)

Yes, that's what the "Move disk" is designed for
So far I've used it to move local/vmdk to nfs/qcow2 and then from nfs/qcow2 to drbd/raw ... And I've never stop VM's ! It works as a charm. One of the VM being my access point to my network (VPN) and moving did not disconnected me ...

 

[Alessandro 123]

Can I use is to move local qcow2 to a gluster qcow2 or the format change is mandatory ?

How does it work, technically? I'm curious.

 

[Belokan]

Yes of course, my examples include format change because I started with vmdk then changed to qcow2 and then I have had to move with conversion once more because only raw is supported with drbd.
But moving 'live' from local to another location shared or not can be done keeping the original format of course (until destination supports the format).

 

[Alessandro 123]

How does it works? How qemu is able to move the storage between 2 location with no downtime?

 

[spirit]

How does it works? How qemu is able to move the storage between 2 location with no downtime?

To simplify, qemu is able to do some kind of raid1 with 2storage. Mirror begin to copy src disk, and new writes are written to both disks. At the end if the copy , à switch is done between src and dst disk

 

[Alessandro 123]

Thank you.