Hello selfhosters!
I’v small homeServer (Dell Wyse 5070) and I’m thinking about upgrade of main SSD M.2 storage.
Currently most of my services are docker containers. During upgrade I want to refresh whole setup and learn ansible a bit during the process.
I’ve got few services that I want to avoid to stop for hours/days which could take me to set the whole server from scratch in the new way (NextCloud, Home Assistant, Matrix), all of them used locally (trough Tailscale) by my family.
I’m thinkging about keeping them running, by connecting old SSD M.2 drive to my laptop and run inside VM. Do you think that will be doable / what kind of troubles I can get through that process? Asking about that “keeping services on my laptop” think. With refresh of server it will of course be the journey with troubles, but I will have time for that, when crucial services will be running on different machine.
what you are attempting is called high availability; it might not be worth it; usually would need three different physical devices (in a homelab situation)…a load balancer to route traffic, and two nodes to handle said traffic. to perform your storage upgrade, you pull one device out of the load balancer, do your upgrade, and then add it back in. then, you do the same for the other load balancer. this would have 100% service availability…but this is a lot of work for a one-person show!
do that for fun - you do you. however, if you can handle a few hours of downtime and don’t want to burden yourself with the long time care+feeding the above setup will require…
remember you can use USB boot, mount both your drives, and then if you are lucky, your distro (on USB) will have a disk management/cloning utility.
click click click, boom…you have bit perfect copy of small M2 on to large M2.
Do not change your small M2! power down, swap 'em, and power on! if it doesn’t work, you still have your OG M2 to boot from.
there are backup/restore utilities and other ways, each taking more and more time…but M2 is pretty quick.
