I have two nethservers holding quite some data (3-500GB each), and would like to separate them on a second disk. In particular I would like to move the content of /var/lib/nethserver/ibay, and maybe also /var/lib/nethserver/profiles and /var/lib/nethserver/home to a separate disk. Reason is I’d like to do vzdumps in proxmox before I update nethserver, which take way to long with those big disks.
Will it work, if I just attach an additional disk and rsync the files and folders over and than mount ibay, profiles and home from second disk? What will be the recomended way to mount. Can this be done in cockpit or do I add those directly in fstab, and if so - what are the needed mount options? Will the premade configurations created when everything was on the same disk, like shares and userhomes continue to work or will I have to take further actions?
I am asking as sometime ago, when I was still testing nethserver, I already had made an attempt copying (did not use rsync but cp) everything under /var/lib/nethserver to a separate disk and then just mounting the second disk to /var/lib/nethserver, and that did not go very well. I was only able to have this setup when I reinstalled and had the mountpoint created before installing nethserver. Thus I thought, it might be easier putting /var/lib/nethserver/ibay, and maybe also home and profiles to separate disk instead of /var/lib/nethserver…
I need, shared folders, userhomes and profiles still working as before.
This is possible on one of the two nethservers installed on zfs. But the other one is on xfs and has raw disks so no snapshotting available. I need it done particularly on the xfs server, as you are right on the zfs prox doing snapshots is easier. But I thought, maybe its worth separating the installation from the data on both servers anyway if it can be done easily.
As those systems now are on prod, and I am not only playing arond around and testing, I need to be safe, so I thought, bether ask then sorry
Edit to add: Speaking of being careful - following a link to a forumspost with my questions about reconfiguring zfs, as there are quite some ProxMox users here, who might be able to answer my zfs reladed questions.
Then migrate to .qcow2 disks. Problem solved. All my Proxmox VMs are stored on my FreeNAS server, which Proxmox accesses over NFS. And while FreeNAS uses ZFS, Proxmox doesn’t have access to any of the ZFS features. Rather, the virtual disks are stored as .qcow files, which support snapshots (.raw don’t).
You can migrate the disk type live, while the system is running. From the PVE web UI, pick your VM, go to Hardware, and select the hard disk. Then click the “Move Disk” button near the top of the window. Select the target storage (probably “local”), then the format (“QEMU image format (qcow2)”). Then click Move Disk.
Well, qcow2 was tested here, and I got very bad performance when making multiple snapshots the vms got slower and slower. Thats why I moved to raw disks and dont want to use qcow2 anymore, but thanks for your suggestion.
Do you think, moving data to a separate second disk is not a good idea and would screw my nethservers?
Just recently I spun up a Nextcloud droplet with a 50 GB block storage added as a second disk mounted at /var/lib/nethserver/nextcloud. I’m more than sure this is a horrible way to go about separating data from the Nethserver installation but I wanted to try to see if it was possible (testing out encryption & re-mounting to 2nd NS install).
I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea, and it shouldn’t harm your system if done properly (though I don’t really have any guidance on doing that, not having done it myself), but it seems like a suboptimal way to avoid addressing your performance issues with .qcow. I haven’t seen any performance issues with that format, but it’s also uncommon for me to have more than one snapshot.
I can help you with a second disk, but you’ll have to wait until evening.
Got a big day today, a big demo is planned at Lunch for a client group, presenting ProxMox, NethServer, FreeNAS/ZFS & Zabbix.
And i’m in Germany at the moment, back tomorrow evening.
Maybe I’ll try qcow2 format once more, but I would like to have confirmation that in case of bad performance I can easily move back to raw. I am considering this as I am not sure if the other idea will work well enough and besides that snapshotting is a nice feature that I would regain with qcow2 on my non zfs prox.
I took a vzdump ~350 GB, so it took a while Now using moving disk which takes a while too ~10% in 20 min… Looking forward to see how qcow2 will perform.
Done and solved, so I think I won’t separate data stay with one disk solution, provided that qcow2 performs about equaly than the raw file. Thanks!
Now using moving disk which takes a while too ~10% in 20 min… Looking forward to see how qcow2 will perform.