Migrating from VirtualBox to Proxmox - A beginning

A long time ago, now (2019, as it turns out), I set up a super-duper AMD Threadripper machine with 16 cores and 32 threads, and 128GB of RAM to be a Virtual Machine host for my home lab. Since then, it has evolved into the host for my PFsense router, my "desktop" machine, and a bunch of other VMs, as well as my storage server. At the time, I set it up with a regular Ubuntu install with VirtualBox running on it. All these VMs are being run on VirtualBox. 

I know. 

Well, time-and-a-half went by, and I became aware of Proxmox. I never really had spare hardware with enough grunt to really try it out, so I kinda let it go. Then, my employment relationship with that online furniture retailer (as well as those of about 500 other folks) suddenly ended. The machine I'd put together as a "BYO" desktop for work was suddenly out of a job as well. That was a pretty beefy machine... AMD Ryzen 7, 8C16T with 32GB of RAM... but it had a sort of narcolepsy problem. it would just... for no apparent cause... stop. It didn't seem to be thermally-related... not the power supply. I have no explanation... it just farts out... but I can usually get a good 6-8 hours out of it, sometimes a lot more. ...so it finally dawned on me that this old beast might be a good Proxmox test mule.   That was a couple months ago.  I decided to give it a go, and I like it. I like it enough that I want to migrate my "production" VM host to Proxmox. 

Well. 

I'd hoped to migrate the VMs, one by one, to Proxmox on a different host, and then do an OS re-install on Jerome (the Threadripper box - named after the "good family man" to whom, Frasier and Niles owed a "favor") with Proxmox, and migrate some or all of the VMs back over. 

The old BYO machine (named Zora, after Fraiser's "excitable" Greek aunt... I have a lot of machines named after characters from Frasier) is based on a Mini-ITX motherboard, so it has only one PCIe slot, and that's taken up by a video card. I need more Ethernet ports to run my PFsense router... and, of course, there's the "oops I forgot how to computer" problem. So, I decided to build a new machine, with a full ATX motherboard, and slots... and I managed to find an AMD Ryzen 7 CPU with 12 cores and 24 threads AND a built-in GPU... so that's exciting. Not QUITE as heavy as Jerome, but pretty good... and 128GB of RAM. So, I can put a 4 x 1GB Ethernet board in there, and run my PFsense router, and the board has 4 SATA ports, so I can figure out how to do my storage. 

Ah, yes, storage. Jerome has three 18TB drives in a RAID5 array, and those are run by the host OS. I'm thinking that under Proxmox, I will have the raw drives forwarded up to one of the VMs that will serve as the storage server... but I'm not entirely sure how that will work. I haven't really dug into the docs yet. I know it's been done in other KVM environments, so... I'm confident it should be doable. When I get the new machine up and running I can try it out. It would be lovely to just be able to take the disks as they are, and plug them in on a fresh Proxmox install, build a fileshare VM and just... ta-da! We'll see. 

So, the parts for the new Proxmox host are supposed to show up today. Hopefully, everything goes together without a hitch, and I can begin properly experimenting. 

Updates when they're warranted.