I thought this would be easy but its turning into a complicated mess.

What I would like to do is simply copy a vm from one proxmox server to another. Yet I do not seem to be able to do that in any simple easy way using the GUI.

The setup I’m trying to do this with:

I have a proxmox server running on a dedicated server I pay for with an IP address of say 12.13.14.15 this has several vm machines running on it.

However, it’s on an older server and costs more than the new server I’ve found hosted by a different company so I’ve brought this second server of a similar setup but with the IP address of say 15.14.13.12

The problem I seem to be having is that one of the virtual machines on the old server has 12TB of data on it and both servers only have 16TB of storage available to them.

In trying to copy from one server to another I’ve found that there is no way to just make a direct connection to both servers that allows me to COPY the vm with 12TB of data on it to the new server.

Either it is a migration which is not an option as I still want the original server to have a copy of the data on it till I’ve successful got the new server working or any backup option I could try wants to make a copy of the 12TB on the original server or elsewhere and then copy that backup across to the new server which is also not an option as I don’t have the space for it.

I just want to be able to, for want of a better explanation, sftp into the new server from the old and give it access to the new servers storage area and click on a COPY button on the old server that allows me to select the new server as a new storage option to copy the vm to and it transfers it over the internet to the new server.

Instead all I’ve found online to do something like this with was proxmox backup server which seems to basically require me to have a whole other third server with 16TB of storage free, which I do not have, to back up the old server to and then transfer that to the new server.

The other option I found was to use a cluster which for the briefest of moments I thought would work and did something close to what I wanted in terms of connecting the two servers together but it only gave me the option to migrate which is more of a cut and paste process and not a viable option as I need it to copy the vm. I tried selecting the clone option but it wouldn’t allow me to select the storage area of the new server when I did that.

And then I nearly lost access to the data on the old server when I tried to remove the new server from the cluster as then the old server wouldn’t do anything without the new server being connected and the only way I could get it working again was to use ‘pvecm expected 1’.

This is what’s made me come here seeking wisdom and to ask if there is a way I can do what want in a simple, straight forward way?

An example of which would be like how proxmox can connect to an ESXI server and import a copy of its vm’s from it to a proxmox server. When I changed over from ESXI to proxmox making a copy of the ESXI vm’s on to the proxmox server was simple, straight forward and easy. I thought this would be even easier to do when going from proxmox to proxmox but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Have I missed something or is what I want to do just not possible with the limitation of storage space and server setup that I have?

How is the storage set up? If it is zfs at both sides you should be able to do a simple zfs send > zfs receive to copy from one machine to the other. If you have different storage types at both ends it could be a little harder, and at that point it would probably be easier to backup from one and restore to the other. That would require that you fix the problem of not having backups, but you should be fixing that anyway as soon as you can.

Another way is to just pipe a dd read call through tar through ssh from one to the other end where it untar's and dd writes all in a single call, this will minimize bandwidth and also achieve what you're after. I'm pretty sure I had an old backup script that did this 25 odd years ago.

Echoing UdoB, setup a PDM VM and connect both PVE servers to it. Under the Remotes in the left pane, click on source server and in the middle pane you should see a little paper-airplane icon ( the icons in order are power, start, airplane, up-right arrow )

The paper-airplane icon is Migrate. You have the option to delete the source or not, in your case I would not delete ( uncheck it )

I would change the target VMID to the current ID + 1000. NOTE that the underlying storage must be the same, lvm-thin to lvm-thin or ZFS to ZFS.