Replacing harddrives and updating from 5 to 7?

[Kloper]

Hi,
out proxmox server has old SSDs that are running out of space and have alot wear, so we decided to replace them.
As it is now, we are running version 5.x... so I was thinking to update to v7 with the ssd update. The question is how to go about it?
My first idea was to clone the current SSDs to the new SSDs with clonezilla and then do a manual update from 5 to 6 and then again to 7... but now I am thinking,
what if I install a fresh installation of proxmox 7 and then reimport all VMs and containers from backup? Would that work?

Or what would be the recommended way on going about this?

Thanks,
Kloper

 

[Dunuin]

Hi,
out proxmox server has old SSDs that are running out of space and have alot wear, so we decided to replace them.
As it is now, we are running version 5.x... so I was thinking to update to v7 with the ssd update. The question is how to go about it?
My first idea was to clone the current SSDs to the new SSDs with clonezilla and then do a manual update from 5 to 6 and then again to 7... but now I am thinking,
what if I install a fresh installation of proxmox 7 and then reimport all VMs and containers from backup? Would that work?

Or what would be the recommended way on going about this?

I think that depends on how much you individualized your PVE. If it is very stock-alike it might be easier/faster to just install a fresh PVE and restore the guests from a backup. But don't forget to also regularly backup your "/etc/pve" folder containing most of the PVE related config files.

How hard it is to expand your storage after cloning the SSD also depends on the underlaying storage you are using. You didn't told us what you are using there.

 

[Kloper]

I think that depends on how much you individualized your PVE. If it is very stock-alike it might be easier/faster to just install a fresh PVE and restore the guests from a backup. But don't forget to also regularly backup your "/etc/pve" folder containing most of the PVE related config files.

How hard it is to expand your storage after cloning the SSD also depends on the underlaying storage you are using. You didn't told us what you are using there.

Thanks for the answer!
I am very new to proxmox, but from what saw online and compared our system (system was here before I came to the company) it looks very default, atleast I couldnt see anything unusual.
As it is now, we have a cluster of 2 machines, each having 2x sata ssd in zfs mirror. That is going to be places by 2x nvme zfs mirror.
Before I do anything I will make sure to create an image of the drives anyway, just in case something goes wrong.
So in theory, a backup of a VM made under proxmox 5.x can be recovered on proxmox 7.x without problems.. assuming its a default configuration?

 

[Dunuin]

Restoring guest backups is the easiest part and these should be backwards compatible, so restoring PVE 5.X backups to PVE 7.X should work.

The more complex part is backing up and restoring your hosts/nodes config files as there is no supported way in CLI or GUI to import/export these. You basically would need to manually compare config files line by line and append or overwrite lines to/on the new PVE installation.

And running a cluster makes everything way more complex.

 

[Kloper]

So the best option would then still be to clone the drives, and then manually update proxmox to v7?
Or is there some other way that you can recommend?

 

[Dunuin]

Because its a cluster and you are not completely sure how it was initially setup, it might be better to just clone the disks and upgrade it.
Shouldn't be that hard to extend your ZFS pool. You first would need to extend your ZFS partitions (usually 3rd partition). And "autoexpand=on" ZFS option (should be enabled by default) would allow ZFS to grow itself to use the whole partition.
And you don't need to change any datasets to make use of the new space.
And if something goes wrong you got the old SSDs as a backup so you could try it again until it works.

 

[Kloper]

Because its a cluster and you are not completely sure how it was initially setup, it might be better to just clone the disks and upgrade it.
Shouldn't be that hard to extend your ZFS pool. You first would need to extend your ZFS partitions (usually 3rd partition). And "autoexpand=on" ZFS option (should be enabled by default) would allow ZFS to grow itself to use the whole partition.
And you don't need to change any datasets to make use of the new space.
And if something goes wrong you got the old SSDs as a backup so you could try it again until it works.

Thanks alot for all your help!!
In the next few days I will create a test setup that resembles the main server and test the cloning process on him, if all goes well Ill do it on the main server. If I run into some issues, you will read about it here and if all goes well, I will update my post here too.
Again, thanks alot for you time!!