Upgrading from 3.4-16

[fictionedge]

Hi

Since there is no more support regarding this version, I would like to know if someone could give me some pointers into moving to the last version, mainly:

* is it safe?
* is it REALLY safe?
* What info do you need regarding my current installation?
* How long can it take?

The system stopped last night and had to reboot, that's what started me thinking I should update

 

[udo]

Hi

Since there is no more support regarding this version, I would like to know if someone could give me some pointers into moving to the last version, mainly:

* is it safe?

Hi,
yes - why not?

* is it REALLY safe?

of course, because you have valid backups - or not? Than it's you fault!

* What info do you need regarding my current installation?

hmm, depends what do you want. but you must done the upgrade - so you need the info and to know what is going on.

* How long can it take?

depends on your environment - if you can move all VMs back from one cluster-node, you can do an fresh install on this free node and move VMs from the next node (offline) to the new one. And this node for node til all is done.

The system stopped last night and had to reboot, that's what started me thinking I should update

This sounds more like an hardware issue and should fixed first (temperature/fan/memory/powersupply).

Udo

 

[fictionedge]

Thx for the reply.
I have backups of the VMs rotating, not of the operating system or configurations and dunno how to make them, disk cloning perhaps?
These backups are valid for the new version or are they incompatible?
Also have the problem of the downtime, how long would it take?

 

[udo]

Thx for the reply.
I have backups of the VMs rotating, not of the operating system or configurations and dunno how to make them, disk cloning perhaps?

Hi,
a clone of the system is imho not nessesary. Save an copy of the configs like "tar cvf /mnt/external-disk/pve_old_etc.tar /etc".

Also should your backup be on an safe place (outside of the server and test an restore before you destroy your old system).

These backups are valid for the new version or are they incompatible?

yes - you should be albel to use qmrestore with this backups (I don't kno if pve3-backups work with pve5).

Also have the problem of the downtime, how long would it take?

Depends on your backup-storage - how fast is the disks/raid/nfs whatever... 100MB/s or usb-disk with 20MB/s?!
Depends how many and how big are your VMs
Depends how fast is your server - an fast server is installed in 5 minutes. Installation of the updates with reboots takes 10 minutes (or much more with old hardware and slow internet connection).

Udo

 

[fictionedge]

Thanks alot for the input I will consider doing this upgrade. I don't feel very comfortable upgrading a system like this because it is not just one more server, many others depend on him. Have a great weekend

 

[Ordent]

I am about to do an upgrade myself right now and I just bought new disks, so that the old system remains available in case of a problem. It costs a little extra but it gives some peace of mind.

Converting old 3.x CT/backups to 5.x is probably going to be a challenge but there are instructions on how to go about it (will found out soon enough how that goes).

Good luck.

 

[Kadir YAPAR]

Hi,
I have updated the following article. You can go through article from 3.x version to 4.4. I raised yesterday. you can ask if you encounter any errors.

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Upgrade_from_3.x_to_4.0