Adventures in ProxMox

Monday

On Monday evening I stood up a ProxMox host server with some lesser hardware than the webserver (though it does have a wee bit more RAM). Established an ISO folder off the NAS and did some basic things. Set up a Win7 Home instance just to test getting a VM going: that went fairly well. Finding a 32-bit browser on the VM was the bigger challenge.

Tuesday

On Tuesday evening, I powered off the webserver and clonezilla'd it. I thought I was having cloning issues, so I ended up doing that twice. Just as I was going to bed, I fired up Clonezilla from the blank VM and kicked off the restore... from my phone. I really missed having arrow keys, but otherwise that was a kick.

Wednesday

Morning

This morning, restarted the VM after cloning: "Booting from Hard Disk.." message. Same thing from last night where I had assumed it was the cloning. Ends up I needed to change the BIOS to UEFI and then add an EFI disk. BOOTS GALORE! Updated the network info and... well, this update is on the VM!

It will probably be a few days before the next steps, which is to remove the disks from the old server and stand up another ProxMox instance, then verify that backups work to where I can restore to a different ProxMox server.

All this for snapshots (I kid, there are many more reasons)!

From an "ease of use" perspective, this was very straight-forward, even with the hiccups. ProxMox+++

Evening

Hello from Attic2024-2.

Executed a backup of Attic2024 over to the NAS and then used the backup utility to restore it with a uniqueID. Threw in another gig of RAM for yucks.

Wednesday (The Next)

And now we're up on a completely different box running ProxMox, having backed up the server to NAS, then restored it to the new setup.

Pretty slick.

Saturday

Updated to 9.2.2, things seemed to be good. Did a backup of the Ubuntu box and it freezes at 3% like clockwork. Have to cold boot the host.

Throttled the Backup bandwidth write to 50MiB/s and it's writing well below that now and taking a substantial minute (probably hours) to backup at the moment. Almost at 2% after 7 minutes. Will see if we make it to 4%.

and we're at 4% in 16.5 minutes. 10 to 11 hours for a backup isn't good, but at least there's a starting point for troubleshooting.

Local Backups

Set up a local backup on the ZFS for quick hand-offs

zfs create vmdata/backups
zfs set compression=off vmdata/backups

1. Open the Proxmox Web UI and go to Datacenter → Storage.
2. Click Add → Directory.
3. Fill out the fields:
   1. ID: LocalBackups (or any friendly name).
   2. Directory: /vmdata/backups
   3. Content: Select VZDump backup file.
   4. Click Add.

pvesm set LocalBackups --is_mountpoint yes

30 minutes was better (1TB VM). Probably could better better, but it's ok enough.