Upgrading Proxmox VE from 4.x to 7.x

[Bizagon]

Hi all,

I'm a first time poster and I'm excited to join your community. I love the Proxmox products. We have a licensed Proxmox Mail Gateway that has changed our lives. We also have 3 Proxmox VE servers, one of which is licensed.

I inherited a 2 node Proxmox VE 4.x cluster that has never been upgraded nor licensed. Both servers are running Debian GNU/Linux 8 (jessie) and have the following system info:

Linux rama1 4.4.6-1-pve #1 SMP Thu Apr 21 11:25:40 CEST 2016 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Is there a guide or a roadmap that I can follow to get my servers up to date in terms of the OS and Proxmox? Are there any major pitfalls or gotchas that I should be aware of? Like I said, neither server is licensed, but I'm hoping to upgrade and then license both ... and never let them get this out of date again!

Would the simplest solution be to dump each VM to external storage, remove each node from the cluster and then rebuild each server from scratch, i.e. installing Proxmox VE 7 and importing the vms? I have a mix of Windows and Linux servers, including one Win 2000 server, a couple Win 7 and Win 10 vms, a Win 2012 R2 server and a bunch of more current Linux vms.

Any suggestions would be most appreciated.

Thank you so much,
John


EDIT: One thing that I should have mentioned is that these are production servers and limited down time is critical.

 

[ph0x]

I would try the second option with a new pve7 server. If you can start all your VMs there (drivers could be an issue ...) it's not worth the hassle going through the update process.
Afterwards you can reinstall the two servers with pve7.

 

[Bizagon]

I would try the second option with a new pve7 server. If you can start all your VMs there (drivers could be an issue ...) it's not worth the hassle going through the update process.
Afterwards you can reinstall the two servers with pve7.

Is there any way to do this with just the 2 servers or will I need a third?

 

[ph0x]

You can setup pve7 as a VM and check if the backups of the VMs of the pve4 cluster succeed to boot. Performance could be awful but that's not the focus, of course.

 

[ph0x]

If some VM fails to boot you will have to investigate anyway with which configuration and versions it still runs.
Apart from that, you can always upgrade pve like usual: edit the sources for Debian AND pve and run apt update && apt dist-upgrade.

 

[fabian]

you can do the upgrade (to latest 4.x, then 5.x, then 6.x, then 7.x) - people have done that in the past without problems, just more spaced out

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Upgrade_from_4.x_to_5.0
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Upgrade_from_5.x_to_6.0
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Upgrade_from_6.x_to_7.0

having working backups is a prerequisite either way (and testing them to ensure they are restorable and at least boot on 7.x is a good idea to verify they are indeed working).