I have spent the last couple of weeks getting my small used PC into my Proxmox server and it’s going great! …Until I quickly ran into the 256GB SSD size limit of the included drive. So I have ordered a much larger (2tb) one so I can expand much more.
Ideally, I would like to make an exact clone of what I have now just on my bigger SSD to avoid having to rebuild my VMs
One issue is that the computer has room for one drive only. I was hoping to get an exact clone to a USB drive then clone to the new drive once replaced with the new one.
Any suggestions or tips would be appreciated, thank you.
EDIT: Took another look in the guts of my system managed to get another 2tb SSD in there.
Disconnected cd drive and got a power splitter and boom. Could probably get another one even with another splitter as it’s got a 3rd sata port.
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the computer has room for one drive only
The case might, but are you sure there isn’t a second SATA port on the motherboard? In which case, and assuming you’re using LVM, it would be easy to plug the 2 drives simultaneously while the case is open, create the appropriate partitions/LVM
pvcreate/vgextendon the new drive,pvmoveeverything to the new drive,vgreduce/pvremoveto remove the old drive, done.I haven’t worked with LVMs in awhile now but I will make note of this if I can manage to get both drives going at the same time.
room for one drive only.
I suggest to free yourself from this limit, because it is your worst one.
Get a case that can have multiple disc drives (an old one will do). Get a mainboard that can host 2 SSD’s plus several HD’s.
Also SSDs don’t even need to be mounted. You can just leave it flapping in the breeze until you get something set up. As long as it’s not literally flapping in the breeze and hitting things it’s probably fine.
I wanted to start cheap so I admit I got something that wasn’t the most expandable long term but my only problems so far have been storage.
If you manage to fit the second drive, I’d keep the OS on the first drive and put your VM data on the second.
If it’s really impossible to add an extra drive, are you able to attach an external drive or map a networked drive that has space for your VMs and LXCs?
In your situation, what I would probably do is back up all my VMs to my NAS, replace the hard drive in my Proxmox hypervisor, re-install a fresh copy of Proxmox on the new drive, and restore the VMs back to my new Proxmox installation. If you don’t have a NAS, you could do this with a USB-attached hard drive, too.
Ideally, though, you should have separate drives for your Proxmox boot drive and your VMs. Even if you’re using a SFF PC that doesn’t have an extra drive bay, could you double-sided-tape a SSD to the bottom of the case and use this as your storage drive? I’ve certainly done it before.
I spent 100$ on a cheap e-waste bound Dell. All proprietary parts so the power supply didn’t have any extra power cables I could see for another drive.
With that being said I’ll take another look just to make sure. As a lot of other people have said a second drive for holding the data would for sure be ideal.
I do have my own normal.windows PC that I could just dump it all onto. My Proxmox install I am not worried about its really just my one VM that I have spent weeks on now getting my various services setup on.
Can the VMs be moved separately? If so, that would make this a lot easier to just move them to a USB and install the new drive.
Get an external USB AAA adapter for like $20 or a SATA expander for about the same price.
Suggestion: spare your future self right now and move to a bare metal Debian install with LXD/LXC (from the repository) for containers/VMs. You can probably do just fine with using containers for everything. LXD is easy, fast, reliable and all of those are way more reliable / reasonable / open-source / less bullshit filled than Proxmox.
I actually did this and reccomend for a power user (for me it was proxmox didn’t quick enough implement virtio-fs), but in case you want a full proxmox like setup I got some recommendations:
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Use LXD-ui. Its a bit annoying with the certificates but gives a nice n easy to use ui (I was only able to figure out how to get this working with the snap, but I didn’t try too hard)
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Setup Virt manager through gtk Broadway. This one requires your own security implementations so definitely don’t just open it to the whole internet, but it allows you to manage VM’s in a browser intuitively.
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Setup ssh, vnc, sunshine, tailscale, a device local to the host you can connect to any number of remote desktop solutions you can cause it all likelyhood setting things up you will break a thing or 2 and it sucks having no access to your device
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Use syncthing or resilio sync to share files between a client and the host PC, saves a lot of time trying fancier stuff like rsync (can probably be used to setup multiple servers storage backup, in case of power outage or whatever but I personally only have 1 host)
gtk Broadway
I never quite understood that project and what limitations that thing has, for instance applications aren’t usually exclusively and purely GTK, them what happens? You get a black square?
syncthing
+1
I think it only works with pure gtk applications, so others just wont have the CLI option to launch
Just to clarify I’m talking about using it for only the virt-manager window, not the whole desktop
Okay, that’s fair. For full desktops an LXD container with xrdp is a better option (eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JrI0m9u3jY) and one day I’ll get one of those working with GPU acceleration.
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