VMs/CTs migration questions.

[Crawling Chaos]

I am on the verge of an upgrade of my old Proxmox machine, and I have lots of questions about the easiest way of doing it, given my setup particularities.



The most concerning issue is how to migrate VMs and CTs between the two setups, since they will not belong to a cluster, nor even powered on simultaneously since I will keep the same PSU. Also, three PCIe cards from the previous machine will be used in the new one, two of them which are passed through to VMs (a dual port NIC to pfSense and four port SATA controller to OpenMediaVault). Besides that, the older machine has a tiny NVMe to boot PVE and an also small SATA SSD to host the VMs and CTs. It was so small that it became out of space very soon, and I had to add an old HDD to the setup to host other VMs. The newer machine will have two bigger NVMe drives to host the PVE and the VMs/CTs, so I wave to learn how to move their storage manually.

I need to do all backups and copies from the VMs and CTs prior to the older machine disassembly, for putting it all together again to copy any forgotten file/storage will be a verry time consuming task.



Given this scenario, I would appreciate any guidance about the easiest way to migrate the already working VMs/CTs to the new machine.

 

[UdoB]

I need to do all backups and copies from the VMs and CTs prior to the older machine disassembly,

Given this scenario, I would appreciate any guidance about the easiest way to migrate the already working VMs/CTs to the new machine.

That's the right way; just use your Proxmox Backup Server (or your "classic" backup destination) as a "relay".

Before you disassemble the old setup verify the restore procedure. ("A backup is not a backup until it is successfully restored at least once.")

Additionally I would recommend to create a copy of /etc/ (and especially /etc/pve) to be able to re-create those settings. There is no complete "restore" of this, it is just meant to be used as a cheat-sheet. While some/several files can just be copied back, my personal approach is to verify every single bit by manually putting it to the right place.

Good luck

 

[gfngfn256]

I will only add 3 things to UdoB's correct advice.

1. Make sure you retain all the old/current OS/data disks - so that you can always reassemble as it is today & just go back to current working condition.

2. Before backing up all the VMs/LXCs - set them not to start-on-boot - so that you will be able to set everything up in the new config - correctly.

3. Rebuild/restore the VMs/LXCs in a structure that works for you - ONE AT A TIME! Make sure each building block works correctly before moving on to the next.

Good luck.