Spent the day today rolling my VM cluster back to ProxMox 8. I’m getting pretty done with Debian 13.

Rollback

A couples months ago, I wrote about how I had to reinstall ProxMox 9, because I started having issues. Well, node two dropped off of Tailscale, and was throwing network errors. Great. So, I moved all containers and VMs off the node, and shut it down.

I’m really not having a good experience with things running on Debian 13. Between my cluster nodes, and VPS, I’m just not liking it. And the new news from Debian hard requiring Rust, yeah, no. So I started looking into rolling back the cluster.

My main concern was, can I migrate a VM/container, from a ProxMox 9 host, to a PM8 host. It went fine going from 8 to 9, but I need to test this before doing anything big. Luckily, I have a virtualization cluster. So I spun up a VM, installed ProxMox 8, and added it to the cluster. Yes, one of the cluster nodes, was a VM, on one of the cluster nodes.

After getting the virtual node added, I asked a VM to move over to it. And, it worked. The only catch was that I had to remove any high availability rules for the VM, as ProxMox changed how these worked from 8 to 9. So with a successful test, I kicked the virtual node out, and got to work.

The rollback process was pretty simple. Migrate everything off of a node, kick the node out of the cluster, take the node out of the rack, hook it up on my desk, install ProxMox 8, rack the node back up, install updates, and added it back the cluster. I just had to do that, three times.

I took the time to come up with some new names for the nodes. The old names were plain, just PVE1-3. Now the nodes are named Bob, Bill, and Riker. Characters from the Bobiverse.

Seeing how I never had an issue running on ProxMox 8 in the past. I’m looking forward to a happy, healthy cluster.