I have a Protectli 8250U system at home that serves as my VM host.  It’s got an i5-8250U with 8 cores, 64GB of RAM, and a pair of internal NVMe drives.  While I wouldn’t run VPS company on it, it’s been excellent for running my home farm.

I was running Proxmox 7.0 on it and was a bit behind on updates.  I also realized Proxmox 8 is out.  It was upgrade time.

Step 1: Back Everything Up!

I use Synology NAS devices, so this step was easy.

First, I went to the Synology DSM web interface, clicked control panel, and then Shared Folders.  I created a new shared folder with these parameters:

Nothing fancy.  No need for the recycle bin.  The only other change was under NFS Permissions:

This shares the NFS drive to my Proxmox server, 192.168.52.2 in this case.  Save and we’re done.

Now over on the Proxmox host, I went to Datacenter -> Storage.  Click Add and select NFS.

For “ID” put whatever you like.  Since the Synology I used is called “alpha,” I called it “alpha_proxmox_backups”.  Specify the server, and then for Export the full path.  In this case, it’s /volume1/proxmox_backups.  Click Add and you’re done.

Now for each VM, you can perform a backup.  Go the VM, click Backup, and then Backup Now:

I selected Stop for Mode, which will shut down the VM, perform the backup, and then restart it.  Click Backup and watch your backups run.

Step 2: Don’t Forget /etc

Just in case, I also backed up /etc.  Log into your hypervisor (the Proxmox physical host) and you’ll see that the NFS share you created is mounted under /mnt/pve/<mount name>

To backup your /etc directory:

tar czf /mnt/pve/alpha_proxmox_backups/etc.20230819.tar.gz /etc

OK, we’re ready to upgrade.  If something goes appallingly wrong, we can nuke everything and import the VMs, but hopefully that won’t be necessary.  Find out tomorrow!

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raindog308

Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox

I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.

I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308

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