Moving Windows Server install to Proxmox VE?

[tgates]

Hello everyone, I'm fairly new to Proxmox and was wondering if it would be possible (Or even a good idea) to move our existing Domain Controller install of Windows Server 2019 to a Proxmox VM on the same machine.

Scenario/Context:
I've started at this company recently and everything is outdated (Servers running Windows 2008 on 2009 hardware). I've decided to do a complete overhaul and start with fresh servers.
We got 3 Dell R350 servers with the only differing spec being storage.
All of them will have Proxmox VE installed (One also having Proxmox Backup Server installed) (Proxmox VE will act as a spare hypervisor and help with Cluster votes on this server)

Basically my question being, our current domain controller is a dell server running no hypervisor, just has Windows server 2019 installed on the Raid(ed) disks, is it feasible or worth it to attempt to move this into a VM on that same machine inside of Proxmox to allow it to join the cluster and provide more advanced management and backup features? (allowing this DC to be backed up nightly)

Or should I just keep this Server out of Proxmox?

Any opinions on this will be appreciated.

 

[jdancer]

Do you have a Linux SME (subject matter expert) on call? If not, may want to contract for 3rd-party Proxmox support or stick with what you know, which is Windows.

If you decide to continue with Proxmox, I highly recommend homogeneous hardware which means same CPU, RAM, and storage.

As for the storage, it depends. If it's local, then ZFS. If looking for shared storage, then Ceph. I run both storage solutions at work. Both ZFS and Ceph wants an IT-mode controller like the Dell HBA330.

 

[tgates]

Do you have a Linux SME (subject matter expert) on call? If not, may want to contract for 3rd-party Proxmox support or stick with what you know, which is Windows.

If you decide to continue with Proxmox, I highly recommend homogeneous hardware which means same CPU, RAM, and storage.

As for the storage, it depends. If it's local, then ZFS. If looking for shared storage, then Ceph. I run both storage solutions at work. Both ZFS and Ceph wants an IT-mode controller like the Dell HBA330.

Thanks for the response.

We do not have a Linux SME on call.

I'm not looking to do anything super fancy, basically it would just be moving the Windows install to an external drive, wiping the raid array, installing Proxmox, creating a VM with the CPU set to host, and using the external storage as the boot disk for the VM.
(After the VM is created I can create a backup and restore it, thus converting the external disk to a disk contained in Proxmox.)

As far as I understand it the Windows install itself would only see very slight differences in hardware.

Maybe the cons don't outweigh the pros, but my reasoning is to give this machine backups and snapshots that it needs. Currently none of the data on this machine is backed up very safely, as the only backups happen nightly and because of limited storage they over right the previous night each night. If something were to get corrupted and it goes unnoticed for even 24 hours it could be lost as it gets written again. (This also doesn't protect against accidental deletion of files.)

Another option is to just use Windows Server Backup to backup to a cloud service, but this doesn't provide a high level of recoverability in case of disaster as the backups would be contained completely off-site. (Although this would take 4.5 hours every night to backup assuming perfect upload speeds)

Should I stick with no hypervisor for this machine and use Windows Server Backup or some other utility?

 

[shaymdev]

@tgates I'm looking at a very similar situation and wonder what you ended up doing. Any insight into your experience?

 

[tgates]

@tgates I'm looking at a very similar situation and wonder what you ended up doing. Any insight into your experience?

I found it's generally bad practice to move an existing domain controller to a VM. It should be a new VM set up as a new controller for the same Domain instead of moving the entire machine image.

But I did find a few good resources to do something like this.
Use DIsk2VHD to convert the entire disk (Check VHDX but not Virtual PC): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd
Using this VHDX file, you can follow this guide to convert it to qcow2 file: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox_VE#Converting_to_qcow2
Then, you can continue to follow that guide to attach the disk to a VM.

If you have a machine that doesn't use a ton of storage, you can use something like Clonezilla with a local > remote configuration. This will allow you to clone the disk to a live VM, instead of using Disk2vhd. (Warning: I've had Clonezilla brick a Windows disk, while only READING from it. Not sure how but it borked the filesystem, and the NTFS partition started showing as a RAW unrecognized type.)

Possible issues: I'm not sure if you can directly convert a VHD or VHDX file to a qcow2 inside Proxmox. You may need to use an external tool for this. The guide shows a VMDK file. If you are using ZFS, the VMs aren't stored in a conventional VM file, they are part of the ZFS filesystem. I'm not sure of the steps for this.

Hope this helps.