Move current Proxmox over to a new computer

New PC? New Install? Need to move Proxmox over to a new computer? No Cluster? NO PROBLEM!

Great! You want to re-install proxmox, but use your current… everything.

Maybe you want to replace a failing drive, or make a RAID-6 configuration, whatever the case – this guide has you covered.

Save your data

Copy these folders/files before you transfer, they make setting up a new install feel like magic.

/root/
/etc/network/interfaces
/etc/pve/storage.cfg
/etc/sanoid/sanoid.conf
/etc/ssh/sshd_config
/etc/crontab
/etc/hostname
/etc/hosts
/etc/resolv.conf

And save those VMs

VMs need to be backed up to the new machine/install.

Backups on ‘local’ are stored in /var/lib/vz/dump/

Backups for PBS that are taken on localhost and are in the same zfs pool as the VM PBS is backing up…

example: /rpool/data/vm/100

Find your most recent backups above and move them to a safe location that can transfer them back once the new partitions are done.

(Optional) Mirror your old drive before wiping it.

Take your old drive, and make an exact replica of the drive.

Just go out to (Microcenter, Best Buy, Amazon) and buy a drive of the same size or larger. Then mirror the drive you’re about to wipe to this returnable drive with Clonezilla.

Now you have an “oopsie, I actually needed that” drive ready.

Import ZFS pools to the new install

If you have a backup pool that needs imported, do that now by telling ZFS the name of the pool to import:

zpool import -f nameofpool

Then you can run zfs get all and should see the newly imported pool.

Renaming a PVE node

You must edit:

/etc/hosts

/etc/hostname

In the above files replace all occurrences of the old name with the new one. Ensure that /etc/hosts has an entry with the hostname mapped to the IP you want to use as main IP address for this node.

Cleanup the old PVE node

Now move the configuration files, as the pmxcfs has a few restrictions to ensure consistency you cannot rename non empty folders. Thus if you have VMs or Containers on the node, which is not recommended when changing a nodes name, you have to recreate the folder structure and copy files per folder level.

Also copy the contents of:

/var/lib/rrdcached/db/pve2-{node,storage}/old-hostname to /var/lib/rrdcached/db/pve2-{node,storage}/new-hostname and remove the old directory.

mv /etc/pve/nodes/prox/openvz/* /etc/pve/nodes/proxmox-Xen/openvz/