Upgrading 6.4 to 7.x, switching to proxmox-boot-tool

[Jago]

Looking at the Troubleshooting part of https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Upgrade_from_6.x_to_7.0 before doing the upgrade, as having an older BIOS-based install on ZFS, I understand I need to https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/ZFS:_Switch_Legacy-Boot_to_Proxmox_Boot_Tool first. However:

NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT FSTYPE sda 8:0 0 2.7T 0 disk zfs_member ├─sda1 8:1 0 1007K 0 part zfs_member ├─sda2 8:2 0 512M 0 part zfs_member └─sda3 8:3 0 2.7T 0 part zfs_member sdb 8:16 0 2.7T 0 disk zfs_member ├─sdb1 8:17 0 1007K 0 part zfs_member ├─sdb2 8:18 0 512M 0 part zfs_member └─sdb3 8:19 0 2.7T 0 part zfs_member sdc 8:32 0 1.8T 0 disk ├─sdc1 8:33 0 1.8T 0 part zfs_member └─sdc9 8:41 0 8M 0 part sdd 8:48 0 1.8T 0 disk ├─sdd1 8:49 0 1.8T 0 part zfs_member └─sdd9 8:57 0 8M 0 part

Originally Proxmox was installed to a 2x2tb mirror, which seem to be sdc and sdd at this point (the 2x3tb drives were added later and added to the same pool as a 2nd vdev). There is no 512M partition on them, just a 8M one, so how do I proceed?

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

Originally Proxmox was installed to a 2x2tb mirror, which seem to be sdc and sdd at this point (the 2x3tb drives were added later and added to the same pool as a 2nd vdev). There is no 512M partition on them, just a 8M one, so how do I proceed?

from the lsblk output it would seem that the machine was installed with the pve installer and ZFS as root and that the 2x3tb drives (sda/sdb) are the first boot drives (at least the 512M partition is something the pve-installer creates)

you can verify this by checking the zpool status output (and checking which disks are actually in the pool and at which position)

In any case - the 512M partition does not need to be on the Zpool (or on the first vdev of it) - as long as the system's BIOS/UEFI can see it as source for booting (and it's properly initialized with proxmox-boot-tool) it should work

I hope this helps!

 

[Jago]

Huh, this is weird. I was certain the host was originally installed on a 2x2tb mirror, but a deep dive confirmed that it's the 3tb drives holding the GRUB boot partitions sda1 and sdb1.

 

[chrcoluk]

I did an upgrade using a test on my lan as well as the machine I talked about on here which was originally done on a quite old version of proxmox, both upgraded fine. Although the hetzner machine is still not activated new zfs features.

If you server already boots on proxmox 6.4, meaning its already on the new zfs, then an upgrade to 7 should be fine as is.

Switching to proxmox-boot-tool will however give peace of mind you can enable and use the latest zfs features on the root pool.

 

[Jago]

Am I understanding it correctly that proxmox-boot-tool is essentially the Proxmox alternative to Ubuntu's usage of separate "bpool" and "rpool" created by the official installer, with Ubuntu bpool being locked to GRUB-compatible features and blocked from having it's version upgraded?