Thinking about moving from XenServer

[Raident]

XenServer has everything I want from a technical perspective, but administration is a pain in the neck - Citrix's XenClient management program is lacking, to say the least. You can't even configure a multicore vCPU without diving into the CLI

So as a result, I'm thinking of moving to Proxmox VE, but I figure that I should first make sure that Proxmox will support something along the lines of my current setup:

1. XenServer is installed to and boots off of a 32 GB USB stick
2. The first guest, a Ubuntu Server VM running NFS (and Samba), is also stored on the USB stick
3. The onboard SATA controller (Intel ICH10) is passed through to the Ubuntu Server VM using VT-d
4. XenServer then mounts the NFS share as remote storage
5. All other guest are created and stored on the NFS share

 

[blackpaw]

With ProxMox wouldn't it be easier to implement the NFS share from proxmox itself?

 

[gbr]

I just moved 24 VM's from XenServer to Proxmox. Everything was a bit of a pain to move, but every VM seems to be more stable. I've only had all VM up on Proxmox for 2 weeks at this point, but I started transferring just over a month ago, so some VM's have been on Proxmox for over 30 days. So far, I'm glad I made the move.

I currently use iSCSI instead of NFS, but want to move to NFS if I can. I would personally have Proxmox mount the NFS server, thereby avoiding moving from a VM back to a VM to get disk IO.

Gerald

 

[blackpaw]

Good to hear gbr, I'm just finishing moving 3 Windows server VM's fro XenServer to ProxMox. Like you say its a bit painful, but once done the management is better.

How did you migrate them? I ended up using Windows Server bare metal Backup/restore

Having the VM's running of a NFS share from another VM does seem a bit fragile, but people are reluctant to make unsupported changes to host servers as well I guess. Be a good candiate for a container.

 

[spirit]

Good to hear gbr, I'm just finishing moving 3 Windows server VM's fro XenServer to ProxMox. Like you say its a bit painful, but once done the management is better.

How did you migrate them? I ended up using Windows Server bare metal Backup/restore

Having the VM's running of a NFS share from another VM does seem a bit fragile, but people are reluctant to make unsupported changes to host servers as well I guess. Be a good candiate for a container.

I'm using disk2vhd from microsoft to migrate them live (with vss). then I convert vhd file to qemu format with "qemu-img convert"

 

[blackpaw]

I'm using disk2vhd from microsoft to migrate them live (with vss). then I convert vhd file to qemu format with "qemu-img convert"

I initially used disk2vhd but one VM had a disk that failed everytime, so I ended up using Windows Backup.

 

[gbr]

I used Clonezilla to do all my migrations.

Gerald

 

[blackpaw]

I could not get clonezilla to boot, even using the recovery mode option.