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.
If this is a Linux based OS, a reinstall is rarely needed. There are many ways to migrate it from an old drive to a new one. Cloning the old one to the new and expanding the main partition to occupy the extra space is one. A cleverer way would be to move it to LVM so that next time you’ll have options for expanding by adding more drives. If the new drive is double the size, you could clone, boot from the new then setup LVM in the empty space, migrate the OS to it, then boot from that, followed by reclaiming the cloned space and adding it to the LVM.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with running it in a VM as you suggested either. Or you could run the new install in a VM then install it in the server once ready.