Scale migration - best way to save jails and VMs

rmont

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Jun 18, 2020
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I am planning to migrate from CORE to SCALE.
I have 2 Linux VMs (that mostly run docker) and a few jails, all installed on a NVME drive that I use as the System Dataset and for the VM boot volumes.

Since jails and VMs will not migrate automatically, I am planning to do a clean install.
But, in order to save the settings of the jails/containers, I would like to be able to copy all files in the jails and VMs to a data drive that I can access later as I do the reinstall.

What's the best way of doing this?

I tried with a rsync of all the iocage directory, but I can't stop rsync from crawling all mount points of the jails. I can exclude the mount points manually, but it is very tedious.
I was planning to do the same with the VMs, but I can see a similar thing happening.

If I take a snapshot of the NVME drive, I'm not sure how to mount it once I'm in SCALE (also some data is on a Bhyve VM that I assume will not be mountable once I'm on KVM).

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction
 

Kris Moore

SVP of Engineering
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VM's will update automatically. Only the jails will not.

For jails, you'll need to either re-setup the apps, or else try to manually copy configuration files from the jail data into the same App on SCALE. Really depends on what apps you are running though. When I migrated my Plex, I copied the Plex configuration directory over, same as if I was moving to a new server, and that kept it working across upgrades.
 

ZombieHorde

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Apr 19, 2016
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VM's will update automatically. Only the jails will not.

For jails, you'll need to either re-setup the apps, or else try to manually copy configuration files from the jail data into the same App on SCALE. Really depends on what apps you are running though. When I migrated my Plex, I copied the Plex configuration directory over, same as if I was moving to a new server, and that kept it working across upgrades.
I've seen you make this comment before about the VMs updating automatically. According to the Scale release side-grade documentations, vms do not. Which one is true? I was planning on eventually migrating to Scale (on my personal server), but I have a domain controller running in a vm under bhyve and I can't afford to lose it as it controls the access to the smb shares on my pool.
 

rmont

Dabbler
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Jun 18, 2020
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I've seen you make this comment before about the VMs updating automatically. According to the Scale release side-grade documentations, vms do not. Which one is true? I was planning on eventually migrating to Scale (on my personal server), but I have a domain controller running in a vm under bhyve and I can't afford to lose it as it controls the access to the smb shares on my pool.
I upgraded and my 2 VMs migrated automatically.
The only issue you will need to solve is that if you need the VM and Truenas to communicate you need to set up a bridge adapter in Network configuration.
There are posts in the forum that explain how to do it. It hasn't been straightforward for me, but eventually I made it work.
If I recall correctly the issue was that the web gui loses connection after you reconfigure the network and you can't save the changes fast enough. So Truenas reverts back to the original configuration automatically.
 

Kris Moore

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We had some bad data on the docs. VM's do upgrade automatically, I've corrected the docs now.
 

gsrcrxsi

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if you need the VM and Truenas to communicate

communicate in what way? like file transfers? i always just used the smb share to do this.
 

Patrick M. Hausen

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communicate in what way? like file transfers? i always just used the smb share to do this.
Like "at all". Talk to each other over the network. Ping. What needs to work before file transfers via SMB can happen ...
 

ZombieHorde

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Apr 19, 2016
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We had some bad data on the docs. VM's do upgrade automatically, I've corrected the docs now.
Thank you very much for the clarification. That was my main concern before trying to convert.

I just checked the side grade document at https://www.truenas.com/docs/scale/gettingstarted/migratingfromcore/ and it still shows the following

"Although TrueNAS attempts to keep most of your CORE configuration data when upgrading to SCALE, some CORE-specific items do not transfer. GELI Encrypted pools, NIS data, metadata, jails, tunables, virtual machines, and boot environments do not migrate from CORE to SCALE. "

Emphasis mine.
 
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