Proxmox Migration and Upgrade

Following my success with WordPress yesterday, I become more confident and opted to tackle upgrades within the core Proxmox environment. I have been running version 8 for a month or so for my efforts, in a mixed bag of old and new systems, but since early August, version 9 has been available.

This effort started by first cleaning out and removing the unnecessary clustering configuration. My primary system was being clustered with an old laptop for some redundancy, but what I was finding was that it was functionally not adding anything. High Availability requires 3 nodes, and not all of the storage could be mounted on each of the two nodes, so the second system just sat there with no work. After a bit of google thru the documentation, I cleared out the second node and moved the primary back to standalone mode.

Next I needed to try the update process with the Proxmox Backup Server installation. This was running version 3, and had also had a version release, moving to version 4. The Proxmox wiki (https://pbs.proxmox.com/wiki/index.php/Upgrade_from_3_to_4) was very helpful and straight forward with this, I walked step by step. The only real confusion is their branching if/else type format around enterprise vs non-enterprise. Since this is only a home installation, I am running non-enterprise, so there is a piece where the instructions have you update the sources but first provides the instructions for enterprise. Eventually it comes back and tells you the altered instructions for non-enterprise, but on the first attempt I missed the distinction. After a bit of troubleshooting and re-reading the details, I found my error, and the rest of the process ran very smoothly. After about 10 minutes, PBS was updated to version 4 and running again. A quick VM backup validated everything was still functional.

Finally I moved to the actual goal, moving from Proxmox 8 to 9. Again, the Proxmox wiki (Upgrade from 8 to 9 – Proxmox VE) made this pretty easy. Run the pve8to9 script, verify all considerations, and start the install. In my case, I needed to uninstall an existing package, systemd-boot, which was a little concerning, but per the known install issues very common. Once done, the rest of the install ran smoothly, and again after about 10 minutes the upgrade was complete.

Following a reboot and browser refresh, both my PBS instance and Proxmox was showing the new versions (4 and 9 respectively), and all my VMs and containers were running again smoothly.

Very happy with this process and the level of documentation.