I Broke my Proxmox Install.

I’ve had to nuke and pave more than a couple of times over the past few years for various reasons. It’s something that every IT person has had to do (some more than others). Because of this, I’ve played around with a couple different backup strategies over time. There are definitely ways that I could make myself have a more robust backup strategy, but honestly one of the things holding me back is my lack of storage. At the moment I just have an NFS share setup and I point my server and workstation backups at that. By the grace of God, I luckily had the thought to backup my Proxmox VMs before I started messing with my fragile 2 node Proxmox cluster. 

I ended up messing up my main Proxmox node in an attempt to remove my secondary node to later become a NAS. To be fair, I was planning on reinstalling Proxmox on the main node anyway since RAID wasn’t quite set up the way it should be. I had the install and the VMs all on the same RAID array and that was really starting to bug me from a best practices standpoint. I wanted to make 2 arrays, one for the OS and one for the VMs so I have some separation between the host OS and the VMs. Considering I’m not doing anything completely necessary on the server, it wasn’t the end of the world that this happened, just annoying. My original reinstallation plan was to wait until my new server came in (old Dell R410) and then set it up in the cluster, migrate the VMs to it and then reinstall Proxmox on what is now my main server, but that obviously didn’t happen. 

I’m deciding to look at this as a learning opportunity. Besides being more thorough with looking at documentation (Read that friendly manual, amiright), I now know that removing a node from a 2 node cluster in Proxmox is a little tricky. I think I could’ve saved it if I had done something like joined a Raspberry Pi to the cluster which I’ve seen people do in order to keep the number of nodes at what was expected for the cluster. I also learned about the fact that my VMs might need to be reconfigured in their file format and my storage setup is not ideal. I have everything setup as directory storage right now and that might cause some bad effects for my hard drives long term, but that’s for another time. For now, I’m grateful that I thought to backup my VMs and for exposing my bad storage setup. If I’m feeling dangerous, I might go with a btrfs storage setup. I’ve heard interesting things.