After running Proxmox 8.x in a lab environment for two years, this weekend was an appropriate time to upgrade.
Backing up each machine was far more straightforward than I thought – shut it down, back it up to a Synology NAS defined in Proxmox, and delete it from the host. Even with 2.5Gbps Ethernet, this took quite a long time.
I spent far too long trying to work out how to get my motherboard (an ASUS Prime X299A-II) to boot from a USB stick with the Proxmox 9 ISO written to it. As it turns out, disabling Secure Boot is a matter of clearing out the keys in the setup utility.
Given a reinstall was imminent, I decided to update the firmware on each of the M.2 SSDs – all Samsung devices. There isn’t an easy way to this, and I settled on writing ISO images with the updater for each model from Samsung’s website. I’m sure it wouldn’t have been too difficult for them to provide an ISO image with all the latest firmware, but I am writing this from a position of not knowing the finer points of why they did what they did.
The actual Proxmox setup was slick, and after fiddling with /etc/network/interfaces to try to get a management interface on the built-in 1Gbps NIC, and a VM interface on the additional 2.5Gbps NIC, I’d wrecked the machine’s configuration. Running the install again and keeping everything on the 2.5Gbps NIC was a lot easier, especially as I disabled renaming the Ethernet interfaces so they had useful names such as eno1 and enp6s0 rather than nic0 and nic1.
Re-applying the Proxmox licence was as simple as copying my licence key on to the machine. No faffing around with anything.
Finally, restoring virtual machines was far simpler than I imagined. After defining the NAS backup store to Proxmox, it’s possible to selectively restore particular images and choose which disks to put them on. I took the opportunity to move all my Retrocomputing VMs to a 4TB SATA drive, leaving the 1TB and 2TGB M.2 SSDs for performance-critical workloads.
The only way the restore process could have been slicker was if I could queue up restores of each of the backed-up images. Having a database image bordering on 750GB and not being entirely sure when it’d finish, and having half a dozen sub-4GB images which I had to restore one by one – that wasn’t the most exciting of afternoons. It seemed much quicker restoring one by one than restoring everything in parallel.
Would I do this again? Absolutely. Would I back up to a locally-attached hard drive as well as the NAS for speed? 100%.