Reinstall or upgrade?

[jmaggart]

TLDR; Should I migrate vm's from a node and reinstall Proxmox or try to "migrate" it while upgrading hardware.

I posted this on Reddit and no one has responded in almost 3 days, so I thought I would try here.

I have a Proxmox 7 node that I stood up primarily as a game server host when I knew next to nothing about proxmox (Only know slightly more now). I currently only have 3 vms. I want to keep those and stand up a Nas (Truenas or Rockstor), migrate my Plex server on a different device to a new vm, setup a VPN server, and thinking about a Pterodactyl server for new game servers.

The host is not clustered and I don't have a free device to create a new node on. I have a PCIe nvme m.2 card that I could use to upgrade the OS drive... I think. I've read a lot about hardware upgrades to nodes and I'm not sure I have the technical skill to do it successfully, thus the thought around just rebuilding the host.

I am also upgrading some hardware and want to make sure I have the least complicated/most effective setup I can.

My current setup is:

ASRock B550 mb

Ryzen 5 3600X

64 GB RAM

256 GB nvme m.2 SSD (OS)

500 GB M.2 SSD (zfs pool)

2 x 2 TB HDD (zfs pool)

New hardware:

1 TB nvme m.2 SSD (new OS)

4 x 4 TB HDD (new zfs pool?)

6-Port 6Gb/s PCIe RAID Host Card

128 GB RAM

Other important facts: I currently have ceph installed but not in use (didn't know what I was doing when I was setting the host up) and I'm not sure how that might complicate a migration.

I'm also not confident about how I would add the raid card into the zfs pool.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[s.lendl]

It looks like you are intending significant changes to your hardware as well as your software setup.
Migrating from one software configuration to another might be tricky, and - as you also noticed - reinstalling Proxmox VE might be simpler on the new Hardware.

The easiest would be to do a backup of the VMs to an external storage and import it back into the new setup once you have upgraded your HW and the PVE installation.

Make sure that all disks in your VMs have the backup option flag enabled

After creating a backup of your VM, you will find the backup in /path/to/storage/dump/vzdump-qemu-104-2023_09_14-11_43_01.vma.zst

once you installed PVE again, you can simply copy this backup file into your storage in the dump directory, and it will show up as a backup, and you can restore from the backup.

 

[jmaggart]

It looks like you are intending significant changes to your hardware as well as your software setup.
Migrating from one software configuration to another might be tricky, and - as you also noticed - reinstalling Proxmox VE might be simpler on the new Hardware.

The easiest would be to do a backup of the VMs to an external storage and import it back into the new setup once you have upgraded your HW and the PVE installation.

Make sure that all disks in your VMs have the backup option flag enabled

After creating a backup of your VM, you will find the backup in /path/to/storage/dump/vzdump-qemu-104-2023_09_14-11_43_01.vma.zst

once you installed PVE again, you can simply copy this backup file into your storage in the dump directory, and it will show up as a backup, and you can restore from the backup.

Thanks for the reply. This confirms what I was thinking.