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Preface

In the first post of the PVE series, I demonstrated migration from the PVE console. Here I record another way to do migration.

Manual migration

You can first enter a node’s shell, then go to the /etc/pve/nodes directory, where you’ll find all the nodes in the same cluster.

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root@pve:/etc/pve/nodes# ls -l
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root www-data 0 Sep 10 11:06 pve
drwxr-xr-x 2 root www-data 0 Sep 10 14:21 pve2

Then enter the target node pve2, where you’ll find many directories. The ones related to migration are lxc and qemu-server, depending on whether you’re migrating a container or a VM. To migrate a container, move the config file under lxc to the same path on the target node, e.g. /etc/pve/nodes/pve/lxc/. Likewise for a VM: move the config file under qemu-server to /etc/pve/nodes/pve/qemu-server/.

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root@pve:/etc/pve/nodes/pve2# ls -l
total 2
-rw-r----- 1 root www-data  102 Sep 11 14:09 config
-rw-r----- 1 root www-data   83 Sep 22 14:40 lrm_status
drwxr-xr-x 2 root www-data    0 Sep 10 11:06 lxc
drwxr-xr-x 2 root www-data    0 Sep 10 11:06 openvz
drwx------ 2 root www-data    0 Sep 10 11:06 priv
-rw-r----- 1 root www-data 1675 Sep 10 11:06 pve-ssl.key
-rw-r----- 1 root www-data 1688 Sep 10 11:06 pve-ssl.pem
drwxr-xr-x 2 root www-data    0 Sep 10 11:06 qemu-server

Since we’re migrating a VM, enter qemu-server/, where you’ll find two VMs.

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root@pve2:/etc/pve/nodes/pve2/qemu-server# ls -l
total 1
-rw-r----- 1 root www-data 451 Sep 22 14:47 101.conf
-rw-r----- 1 root www-data 456 Sep 22 14:11 102.conf

We choose to migrate VM 101, so move 101.conf to the corresponding directory on the other node pve.

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mv 101.conf ../../pve/qemu-server/

Then check on the pve node.

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root@pve:/etc/pve/nodes/pve/qemu-server# ls -l
total 1
-rw-r----- 1 root www-data 452 Sep 22 14:11 100.conf
-rw-r----- 1 root www-data 451 Sep 22 14:51 101.conf

After confirming the move is done, check the VM’s status.

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qm list

You’ll find VM 101 is stopped; then start it with a command.

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qm start 101

The VM has moved and started successfully, running smoothly.

Migration with local storage

In PVE, you can also use a ready-made command to online-migrate a VM with a local disk:

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qm migrate <vmid> <targetnode> --with-local-disks --online

But actual measurement showed it took nearly 40 minutes to migrate, and that’s just a 256GB Ubuntu VM.

Closing

This post just records that migration can be done by moving the config file.