Reinstalling Proxmox without losing VM's

[mwg47x]

First, let me say up front that this is a home lab and not critical by any means.
I want to do this so my server is bit more resilient, but also for the learning it will entail.
Having a previous boot environment to revert to, if necessary, is very appealing.


The goal:
To remove the old single boot SSD in my single node, add 2 new drives and install Proxmox to a ZFS mirror.
I have all my VM disks in raw format on a NFS share on a TrueNAS box.
There are 2 VM's I really don't want to lose.
They are old 2008R2 servers and even though I have a MAK key for that OS, reinstalling is a PITA as it won't activate online any more.
I don't want to connect them to the internet anyways.
That's why I have a VLAN that is isolated from the outside world.

My plan:
Shutdown my vm's and create a backup of each, putting the vzdump files on the NFS share.
Shutdown Proxmox, swap out drives as necessary and install Proxmox on a ZFS-Mirror.
Recreate the NFS storage and the 2 additional virtual bridges I am using, along with anything else I am not thinking of right now.

Then just restore those backups and I should be good to go, right?
Is my plan sound or is it garbage?

I would appreciate hearing about any potential problems to watch out for.
Thanks for having patience with a noob.

 

[LnxBil]

If the data is extern as you described, the easiest method of "recreating" the VMs is to backup /etc/pve/qemu-server and/or /etc/pve/lxc and copy them back after reinstall. Those are the config files. Best to also have a full backup of /etc/pve, not only the subdirectories.

 

[Johannes S]

Your Plan sounds good, you should do an backup anyhow. Don't you have them at the moment?
Lnxbils proposal will be faster than a complete restore though.
I would backup the vms and lxcs togethwe with /etc/pve. Than reinstall and restore the config. If everything works: Great no restore needed, otherwise proceed with restoring vms and containers.

You should test the restore before wiping the server, for the vms and lxcs just restore them to another it. For testing a config restore a new vm with ProxmoxVE should be good enough ( if your hardware doesn't support nested virtualization just look whether the config looks ok, still better than no test at all)