Finally managed to get my hands on 2x1TB NVMe’s. Budgets are tight these days … :-) They are Crucial P310 … hope they are reliable, although I suspect nowhere near Samsung stuff.

I have a little Proxmox installation running a VM on a 256GB NVMe, which as you can imagine is tight. Is there a way of cloning this installing on one of the new NVMes?

Reason why I have 2x new NVMe is that I want to eventually get myself to Proxmox HA, so that the two machines (two little Optiplex 5070, one of which has the 256GB install) provide me with redundancy.

First thing is to clone the 256GB install to the larger NVMe. Would it be an idea to go this way: a) install 1TB new NVMe on spare Optiplex b) install Proxmox on this new machine c) find a way to replicate the whole 256GB install on the second machine (need to read the docs to see if/how this can happen) d) once second machine is up and running as a clone, remove machine with 256GB (current machine) and install the 1TB NVMe. e) do the same above process the other way around.

Do you think this will work or am I going to hit a wall? Is there a simpler way of doing this?

  • Redjard@reddthat.comEnglish
    1·
    8 hours ago

    This would be a great application of btrfs. Copy over the boot-partition directly via cp /dev/nvme{0,1}n1p1 or similar.
    Then, simply add the data partition(s) to btrfs. You can then tell btrfs to migrate all data out of the old partition, and finally remove it. All in a running system.

    I have migrated the rootfs on running systems before using this method, it’s a super clean approach.

    BTRFS also nicely handles the redundancy with its checksums. Usually you can’t fix bitrot between two drives, but btrfs can tell which version is correct. Makes scrubbing easier.