3 ways to migrate your Proxmox VE server to new hardware

I cover 3 methods to migrate a Proxmox VE server from an exiting piece of hardware to new hardware. I cover migrating drives to the new system, using backups to restore data, and using a cluster. I cover the pros and cons of each method and when I would use them.
Let me know if you have any thoughts or video suggestions in the comments below.
00:00 Intro
00:16 Moving drives: Overview + pros and cons
01:17 VZ Dump backups: Overview + pros and cons
01:40 Using clusters for migration: Overview + pros and cons
02:07 Demo: Moving drives
06:12 Demo: VZ Dump backups
12:01 Demo: Using clusters for migration

[@rockymarquiss8327]

You do a great job in communicating the options and the process. Keep up the good work!

[@hawkingoh]

I second that! Really well made content and presentation!

[@Solar_and_Security]

Great video, I needed this like a month ago when I was trying to figure out how to migrate my VM's to a new cluster. There is so much bad info out there on this... nice job.

[@Texacate]

You, my friend, are a genus. I pulled a wifi card out of my proxmox server. The system booted up, but the web interface was unreachable. Now I know how to fix this.

[@BudgeProjects]

Man can I say, big thanks for all the proxmox how to videos you make! I was struggling setting up or figuring out what kind of virtualisation was right for me when setting up a home server. From watching your videos I got proxmox going and its been running steady for months now! Having fun using it for many other things now

[@chrisumali9841]

Thanks for the demo and info, have a great day

[@MauroSedrani]

Great tutorial, as usual!

[@eulate90]

another masterpiece, thanks man! keep up the good work!

[@ewenchan1239]

Great video!!! Thank you for going over this.

[@AverageDaveVideos]

Amazing video! Thanks!

[@Dave64track]

Great video just what I was looking for.

[@user-ub3pm6wo2y]

Great video! Great review and methods!! Thanks a lot!!!

[@mannyvazquez6265]

Once again, another great video ...

[@thesharpshooter4u]

You sir, are a true wizard! Thank you for the clear and concise demo. I was having trouble migrating from an old machine to a new one, and this helped me do it flawlessly.

[@adnan7cudic]

Thanks a lot for the help, I moved my drives to another server without thinking much about it. The network interfaces were all different and after adjusting all that and restarting the networking service it all works perfectly. Definitely subscribing, great work man!

[@Skyverb]

Video was straight too the point and helpful. Thanks!

[@4Meerkats]

Thanks so much for your videos!!! I wasn't sure how to migrate running VM's and found your clear and concise video explaining it.

[@dominiks1400]

It worked like a charm. Thank you!

[@danielpisarek6272]

Thanks man for making this video. It is very helpful. Keep doing this job.

[@Coffeefirst27]

external usb option was just what the dr ordered...worked great, thanks!

[@sethstenzel]

Hey thanks for this, exactly what I was looking for.

[@omarrizo5816]

Great video again, literally. Your ProxMox videos are really helpful for newcomers. Thanks again!

[@drreality1]

Great video as always 👍

[@c0p0n]

Thanks, great vid as usual. Another potentially sticky point are usually hardware specific configs like PCI passthrough, or different NIC configuration

[@Darkk6969]

Great video! Good to see the proper steps of removing the nodes from the cluster and removing the cluster configuration files to avoid issues in the future if you ever decide to create a new cluster. It would be nice if this can be done via the WebGUI but given so many storage options like CEPH, ZFS with replication and etc I can see why command line is the preferred method.

[@TheekshanaAmbepitiya]

Thank you, method 1 of moving drives helped me

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

Glad it helped

[@_JSSSX_]

Thanks a lot, very helpful !

[@york29]

Great video. Thanks

[@imawsome6]

Thank you for this!

[@stefanescugratian3221]

Sehr Gute Arbeit 👍👍👍 Grüße aus Deutschland 🇩🇪

[@dwieztro6748]

woowww.. greatttt.. nice tutor, love proxmox

[@vng]

If you have several servers, you can also set up a Proxmox Backup Server and use that to store all your VM backups. This also allows you to easily restore a backup to a different server, effectively migrating it.

[@rcdenis1]

Subscribed!

[@famousartguymeme]

Life saver!

[@ManfredBartz]

Great tutorial. 👍 Another tut for mapping hardware (graphics and/or network card) to a VM might be useful.

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

Thanks for the idea. I’ll add that to the video list.

[@Cmnore]

Excellent video! I am trying to figure out how to restore a broken PVE node that crashed after an update/upgrade and lost its GRUB configuration. I am using PVBS so I have my VM's backed up but I'm not sure the quickest/easiest way to do so. The single VM in question is TrueNasScale which has several drives passed through to it via Proxmox. Can I simply transfer the drives to another node and restore the VM to it somehow? I'm concerned that I'll lose data from the TrueNas VM although I suppose I could add the data drive pool after the VM is running and hope it "sees" the existing pool? Anyhoo, thank you for the great tutorials on ProxMox. Your teaching style is clear and concise.

[@hpsfresh]

niiiiice….. thanks

[@kot5178]

спасибо бро

[@seapro4018]

Actually I've been thinking of going this way. the new 1 will handle all the vm's and the current server will become my backup (in case the primary goes down) and also be the backup server. I'll have another server at a Dr site configured with PVE and PBR so if everything goes south, I'll have a 2nd offside box to use.

[@LubomirGeorgiev]

How are live migrations handled when moving to newer/different processor? Are they still possible?

[@martinzipfel7843]

You seem like the proxmox guru. I ran into a super weird issue today and hope you have an idea of what might have happened. I ran VE 7.4 on a single NVME in a PCIE adapter. I had IOMMU enabled to passthrough other PCIE devices. Now I wanted to install VE on a Raid1 Sata SSD cluster instead. Installation was no problem but I can't get the beast to split the PCIE devices into different IOMMU groups. Now I put the PCIE NVME back in, booted from it and all devices are split into IOMMU groups again. I have applied exactly the same setting to the grub file. For hours I've been trying different things to make it work. Is it possible that the split is prevented because the two SSD are connected to different SATA controllers? Any help would be appreciated :)

[@JonathanScottNZ]

This is helpful, but I'm confused about the Networks share part, you don't go into (maybe you do, but perhaps I don't pickup on it), what the share name needs to be, is it the same name as the ID or is it the same name as the folder (in the example nfs)

[@em3888]

That is exactly the problem I have in mind for last 6 months or so. Got worst with the new 13 gen cpu, cannot install them from iso , have to use old sod with new kernel .

[@gpmdp]

Great job!!! Clear and simple. Just one question: Whats's printed on your tshirt? A kind of linux commands? hehehehe!!! its video inverted?

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

That shirt has a lot of Linux commands written upside down so the wearer can read it by lookijg down at their shirt. I wanna say it was from the xkcd store but that seems to be down now.

[@gpmdp]

I LOVE IT !!!!!!! Hehehehehe!!! @@ElectronicsWizardry And by the way: Thanks for your tutorials!!!!

[@vklab24]

what about moving VM's between nodes?

[@davincicode1238]

can you migrate from hyper V to VM in proxmox?

[@JaZzDeOliveira]

I had my proxmox host crash during a update , I have installed proxmox on a new drive and I have my VM configs backed up , I am trying to copy the VM Disks from the old drive over to the new drive but I am stuck at a point were I cant mount the old drive dur to the same VG Name "pve" any suggestions? all I want to do is copy the VM Disks from old drive to new for the machines that I did not have a chance to back up

[@seapro4018]

Hello. I've got a question about the feasibility or reliability of a 2 node cluster. I am migrating from ubuntu/kvm on ubuntu to proxmox. I was thinking of keeping my old system and adding it as the 2nd server in a cluster. both would have local storage and their vm's running in that environment. is HA available as well as failover in a 2-node cluster? there seems to either some confusion about the 'correct' # of servers in a cluster - 2, or 3. Are 3 only needed for HA or can i configure and run a 2-node server w/o issues? I had originally thought of using the older server as a proxmox backup box but if I can use it in a cluster - then that's all the better. i'll be purchasing the minimum enterprise licensing - if that matters. thanks.

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

The issue with a 2 node cluster is if one node fails, the cluster can get stuck as no quorum(majority of nodes agreeing) can occur. Without quorum typically you can't start any vms/containers or make other changes. Typically 3 nodes is typically needed for HA, as it allows one node to fail, and the cluster can continue to have 2 nodes in agreement. You can cheap/low power 3rd node like a mini pc to reach 3 nodes if needed. This video focused on using a cluster for migrating to a new server, and the 2 node cluster would only be used when the migration occurs.

[@seapro4018]

@ElectronicsWizardry I've been considering the same thing, primarily so it's 'just there' to make the quorum, but as it'll allow me to manage all devices from a 'single pane', I should be good. The other 2 devices will have storage motion configured and 1 will also double as a backup server running PBR. Do you think this will work?

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

@seapro4018 I think this will work fine. If it was me I'd want to test one node going down just to see what happens, and to learn the commands to fix it in case it happens.

[@tomaszpieczka1824]

It`s crazy ...

[@em3888]

Oh wait, I have one more problem with backup, since my vm use zfs nvme instead of the local, how to actually back them up? Or transfer into different node?

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

You should be able to backup a vm using storage on any filesystem or storage media that proxmox supports. So you can make vzdump backups and move those to the new system.

[@SaschiIein]

Today I have the problem, the boot SSD makes more and more problems with system halts etc. so I have to replace it. What way would you suggest? Copy with partition magic failed today during read errors. So perhaps it's the best to set up a new Proxmox server on a new ssd and copy the container and vm's?

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

If your replacing a failing drive I’d try to make a clone of the drive using ddrescue first. Ddrescue is made for failing drives and can restart if the system needs to be rebooted or the drive drops out. If the image is created without issue I’d clone it to anouther drive and keep using that install. If there are errors I’d try to make backups of the VMs and move to a new install to remove any possibly corrupted parts of the install.

[@SaschiIein]

@@ElectronicsWizardry thank you, I'll try this one. Parted Magic should have it onboard, so I give it a try.

[@reviewtoday1069]

I think external hard drive has the least risk since there are fewer steps.

[@drreality1]

Is there an easy way to backup proxmox boot disk? Thanks again

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

Proxmox doesn’t have a built in way to do boot drive backups. You can other backup tools that are made for Debian and other Linux distros but that won’t be integrated with proxmox.

[@drreality1]

@@ElectronicsWizardry thanks so much, I hope that you’ll have a tutorial on this at some point, it is indeed annoying to start from scratch but I guess not a disaster, so it would be great if you can migrate the install as well and have much less down time 😅

[@hawkingoh]

@@drreality1 Maybe The Clonezilla project may be interesting for you. I used it to clone complete boot drives even really old Windows XP HDD's (used in a old CNC machine) to SSD.

[@drreality1]

@@hawkingoh yea that might be an option 😀 never tried it before

[@WillFuI]

not sure if u will read this but i cant seem to find the right key words to find what im looking for. im looking to move my proxomox instal and vms from 1 ssd to another as i want to change how redundant my os is. cna u link me a video or artical on how to do that if it wouldnt bother u

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

You should be able to do this easily by adding the new ssd storage to proxmox. Then for all the VMs select the disks and then select the move option. This will move the storage to the new storage. Once all the disks are moved you can remove the old storage. If you’re using zfs you might be able to add a mirror to your existing ssd without having to add a new storage to the system.

[@WillFuI]

@@ElectronicsWizardry I would just add another disk but I installed proxmox onto a 256gb cheap m.2 and my motherboard doesn’t have another m.2slot. I want to move all that onto a pair of Intel s3700’s. And I would like to get rid of that ssd. I will try this once I get off work

[@WillFuI]

@@ElectronicsWizardry I was able to move all my vms over but I can’t figure out how to move my bios boot over maybe it isn’t worth doing.

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

@WillFuI there isn’t an easy way to move the boot data to a new drive in proxmox. Probably easier to backup VMs and reinstall proxmox. There are some disk cloning things that could be done but that gets complex fast.

[@bigjoe714]

What is the correct way to unmount the USB drive after I restore the backups?

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

If you mounted the drive in the terminal you can use the umount /path/ofmounted/drive to unmount the drive.

[@bigjoe714]

@@ElectronicsWizardry ok thank you. Should it be removed from proxmox storage first?

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

@bigjoe714 you want to use the unmount command first then unplug from the computer. The unmount command will make sure all the data is safely on the disk so it’s can be removed with no risk of data loss.

[@bigjoe714]

@@ElectronicsWizardry No sorry I am referring to the Proxmox storage tab, where you showed how to add a directory to the mountpoint. Should it be removed from there before unmounting.

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

@bigjoe714 oh yes. Remove it from Proxmox storage, then unmount in terminal. Then unplug physically.

[@pepeshopping]

I will say it again: Proxmox is great, but still lacks BASIC features to restore the configuration. Having to manually change network files is NOT “Enterprise ready”!

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

Yea confit backup would be nice. It would be nice to have a ability to export all the vms configs. To be fair to Proxmox if you move drives between systems and have static IP or other network configurations specific to the nics you will need to set that up again on the new hardware. You often have to do this in the command line as if the network isn’t up you can’t use the web gui or the normal management page.

[@LubomirGeorgiev]

It definitely is. Enterprise doesn't mean GUI only lol

[@Darkk6969]

The recommended way is fresh install on the new server, duplicate the settings from the old server and then migrate the VMs over. The way he did in this video is perfectly fine if you know your way around Linux's command line. There might be a backup script available that actually copies the settings over and only thing you have to do is fix the network configuration. Either way the process isn't too hard to do.

[@louf7178]

"Migrate"

[@shephusted2714]

the cluster and live migration obviates lots of this and why you may want to have more nodes or dual clusters - loth of business should have at a minimum a couple nas for HA and secure backups - things break so having redundancy and ha is vital and cheap insurance consider faster netfs and options - nfs/cepg/gluster/ocfs2/sshfs