I was wondering if I could get some suggestions from the community about the best way to go about migrating from Windows Server on my homelab host to Proxmox.

Background: Currently running Server 2022 Datacenter on my host because that’s what I was familiar with. Using Hyper-V to manage multiple VMs like HomeAssistant and TrueNAS among other things. I have multiple container apps running within TrueNAS. There’s an HBA passed through Hyper-V to the TrueNAS VM that has all of my HDDs connected to it. I’m just looking to migrate away from anything Microsoft/Windows.

Way Forward: The only procedure that I could come up with in my head was moving everything off of the NAS to my personal PC if I have the space, or maybe multiple PCs in the house. Back up all of my configs. Install Proxmox on the host, build out the VMs again, then restore the configs and just hope everything works the same. Or, just backup my configs build the new VMs on proxmox, restore and hope the new TrueNAS VM sees the data on the HDDs? I don’t know if that would work.

If someone has a better idea, I’d like to hear it. Is there any way to dual boot Proxmox on the host maybe and slowly migrate things 1 by 1? Can you convert the VMs from Hyper-V before I install Proxmox?

Thanks everyone!

  • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    1·
    2 hours ago

    God, I’m sorry you had to use Hyper-V.

    As challenging as Proxmox is for someone new to it, it’s so much better than Hyper-V.

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    9·
    4 hours ago

    Can’t you somehow convert the virtual harddisks of your VMs from vhd or whatever it is to qcow2 and start them on the new hypervisor? I mean that’s pretty much the abstraction, virtualization is made for. I’ve never done it for Windows, though. I believe the “qemu-img” package has tools to convert disk images. It’ll obviously need quite some temporary storage. And the VM configs / networking to be recreated on Proxmox.

  • kieron115@startrek.websiteEnglish
    3·
    3 hours ago

    Edit: Also yeah you should be able to dual-boot but I wouldn’t recommend it. Linux and Windows bootloaders don’t like to play nice with eachother.

    2nd Edit: Added the official PVE Hyper-V migration documentation, but that blog covers it in more detail.

    3rd Edit: It looks like there are some important caveats when virtualizing TrueNAS, which I assume you’re familiar with since you have it virtualized already but I wanted to add the TrueNAS virtualization guide just in case. https://www.truenas.com/blog/yes-you-can-virtualize-freenas/

    You should be able to migrate most or all of your existing Hyper-V VMs to Proxmox, which would be relatively straight forward. My recommendation would be backing up everything to your TrueNAS (that has the dedicated HBA) then you can wipe your Windows boot drive and install Proxmox. Then you could start by migrating your TrueNAS VM over and passing it’s HBA back to it.

    Once you have your NAS working in PVE then you could either migrate/rebuild your other VMs, or look into splitting your services into containers (Proxmox uses LXC natively, but Docker is another option.) There are some great helper scripts to get services spun up quickly so you can minimize downtime.

    You didn’t mention how much, if any, experience you have with PVE/Debian and I know from a friend recently switching that some things are a bit more “difficult” than TrueNAS so hit me up if you need anything. The PVE admin documents will be helpful as well.

    https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Advanced_Migration_Techniques_to_Proxmox_VE#HyperV