Best way to migrate Hansson IT VM to new install on a different machine

ℹ️ Support
,
1

I have been using the Hansson VM for several years for Nextcloud at home on a QNAP box. I am building a new compute/NAS server and I will need to migrate Nextcloud over to the new thing. I’m looking for advice for:

  • How I should do the new install, is the Docket AIO the recommended way? Or something else?

  • How should I migrate my existing install? I can have both machines up at the same time on the same network if that helps. There are only about 700GB of files. I would like to keep as much of the history and config of the existing install as possible, not just move the files over with new created times, but I’m open to suggestions.

2

If you are happy with the VM and you can upgrade it, nice things about vms is that you can move them between hosts.

Before migrating and changing, you can just test the Nextloud AIO, there is also some documentation:

that answers some questions about migration.

1 Like
3

Thanks. I’m sorta/maybe happy with the VM. Originally, I was very happy with it. Quite a bit of though has gone into the setup to harden things and generally make it “just work” out of the box. But, a few things are appealing with the AIO Docker setup:

  1. I’m a lazy Nextcloud admin. I don’t keep up-to-date with software. The Hansson VM has to be coaxed into upgrading to intermediate major releases if I am two major releases behind. To put it another way. If I’m on 23.y.z and 25.0.0 is now current. I cannot just upgrade the VM to 25 (which I shouldn’t do anyway) and I cannot get the VM to agree to upgrade to any 24.y.z first, because 25 is now out. It may seem small, but it keeps happening.

  2. There is some appeal to running the currently recommended method from the project, which I think is the Docker AIO install, but I’m not sure. That’s why I asked in my original post.

A minor thing, but maybe there’s also some appeal to a container being able to use more cores and RAM that I would tend to give the VM? It would rarely need it, but occasionally does when I dump a bunch of files that need indexing by fulltextsearch. This comes with lack of isolation though.

4

You could run AIO in a VM, which would give you the best of both worlds.

I’m not really familiar with QNAP, but just some general thoughts.

Yes, VMs are generally a bit heavier on the host, but QEMU/KVM, which I believe is what QNAP uses for virtualization, does not have much overhead by itself. Also, just because you allocate a certain number of cores or a certain amount of RAM to a VM, it does not mean that those resources will always be fully utilized by the VM or permanently taken away from the host.

On the other hand, if you install AIO directly in Docker on the QNAP, and the full-text search or something else that’s CPU and/or RAM intensive kicks in, it might indeed use more CPU and RAM than you’d allow a VM to use, which can be a good or bad thing depending on what else is running on your NAS.

5

Thanks for the reply. I think I’ve sorted things out.
I’m going to look at the differences between an advance/DIY install and the AIO container, then I’m going to do a files only migration to it.

6

This topic was automatically closed 8 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.