I have spent the last couple of weeks getting my small used PC into my Proxmox server and it’s going great! …Until I quickly ran into the 256GB SSD size limit of the included drive. So I have ordered a much larger (2tb) one so I can expand much more.
Ideally, I would like to make an exact clone of what I have now just on my bigger SSD to avoid having to rebuild my VMs
One issue is that the computer has room for one drive only. I was hoping to get an exact clone to a USB drive then clone to the new drive once replaced with the new one.
Any suggestions or tips would be appreciated, thank you.
If it’s really impossible to add an extra drive, are you able to attach an external drive or map a networked drive that has space for your VMs and LXCs?
In your situation, what I would probably do is back up all my VMs to my NAS, replace the hard drive in my Proxmox hypervisor, re-install a fresh copy of Proxmox on the new drive, and restore the VMs back to my new Proxmox installation. If you don’t have a NAS, you could do this with a USB-attached hard drive, too.
Ideally, though, you should have separate drives for your Proxmox boot drive and your VMs. Even if you’re using a SFF PC that doesn’t have an extra drive bay, could you double-sided-tape a SSD to the bottom of the case and use this as your storage drive? I’ve certainly done it before.
I spent 100$ on a cheap e-waste bound Dell. All proprietary parts so the power supply didn’t have any extra power cables I could see for another drive.
With that being said I’ll take another look just to make sure. As a lot of other people have said a second drive for holding the data would for sure be ideal.
I do have my own normal.windows PC that I could just dump it all onto. My Proxmox install I am not worried about its really just my one VM that I have spent weeks on now getting my various services setup on.
Can the VMs be moved separately? If so, that would make this a lot easier to just move them to a USB and install the new drive.