The Migration
While Vmware was really good for my homelab it was getting to be an effort. I used Vmware’s Vmug program to test out different vmware products like NSX, vRA, and ESXI products. We are a big VMware shop at work and I wanted to test out building and breaking things without the VMware Admins getting mad at me. I set out to automate and deploy Windows and linux servers with a front end website to request builds following up with something that could enforce configuration changes like puppet. This worked great for my homelab for a good 5 years but it was getting old paying the subscription fee for vmug and having to find specific hardware or modify the boot config to deploy ESXI on hardware I had around the house. We also had the solution deployed at work so the need to figure out how it all works together was done plus I was over being restricted around server hardware. Time for a switch….
In comes Proxmox
So were off on a mission to migrate over to proxmox, I can’t use the already running Vmware environment as I have servers running on both ESXI hosts and the memory is maxed out. Time to test out building a new server with hardware I wanted.
Install of Proxmox
Proxmox was more or less a straight forward of a install. I did run into a few issues with the motherboard I bought. For some reason the first bootup it required a GPU even though it had built in HDMI. Good thing I had my daughter’s old pc still around and I was able to pull the old GPU from it and start the boot process in to the bios to turn on SVM for virtualization and install proxmox.
I started off grabing the latest Proxmox VE ISO
Proxmox has great documentation, Im not even going to try go over all of it but if you follow this guide you should be just fine.
I downloaded the ISO file and use a great program to write the ISO to a USB drive.
The hard drive setup would be as the following using ZFS.
850 EVO 250gb - Proxmox install
850 EVO 1TB - Virtual machines 850 EVO 1TB - Virtual machines
Seagate 2TB - VM Templates, Containers, Container Templates
I also have a DS920+ that I use for all my other backups. So it made sense to store any templates, ISO , and Image backups here. This was done by just creating a SMB/CIFS share in proxmox.
So far so good. I created my first windows and Ubuntu Server templates. Setup backups jobs and recreated a few easy virtual machines I had running on the old ESXI hosts. I have a few that I need to move over but I wanted to try out the conversion process listed below. I need to save that for another weekend when I can migrate and move the old Vmware servers into the Proxmox Datacenter.
Migration of servers to Proxmox VE
So far the setup is running great. IO delay is really low and overall performance has been most excellent!
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