Recovering VM to different hardware.

[Arkive]

I've been dabbling with Proxmox on a Xeon server I recently picked up but I want to go a little deeper so I ordered three Zimaboards during their Christmas sale (Zima 832 for $139) to try out clustering and am waiting for those to show up. In the interim I created three VM's on my existing host and made a nested Proxmox cluster to test on. My intention is to stand up a bunch of smaller VM's that I can run in HA on the cluster so my environment doesn't crack if my host goes down (DNS, reverse proxy, etc).

My question is, if I build those VM's now in my test environment and back them up, can I simply restore them once I create the cluster on my Zimas? For reference the current host system is running a Xeon D-2146NT and the target Zima is running a Celeron N3450. They're both Intel but I'm curious if I'll see any issues on a restore since I set the CPU type on the nest Proxmox installs to "Host" as was recommended. Should I expect any networking issues? Is remapping the networking interface fairly painless, or no? Thanks in advance!

 

[aaron]

If you restore them on the new machine, you can change the storage to which they are restored to.

Make sure that the CPU cores and memory assigned to the guests works out on the new hardware. Especially if it has less of both than the old machine.

The network should work if the setup of the host is similar. For example, if all you used was the vmbr0 to attach the guests to, you are fine. If you had a more complicated network setup, you can recreate it on the new machine or change the guests config to which interface (internal software switch) they are connected to.

When cold starting a VM and the CPU type is set to host, it will pick that up and things should be fine. When you have a cluster and want to live migrate VMs you need to pay more careful attention to the CPU type, especially if you use different models or generations of CPUs throughout the cluster. Then you want to configure the lowest common denominator so that the VMs only use instruction sets that are supported by all CPUs.

 

[Arkive]

Great advice, thank you.