I mentioned in my first post this year that I would cover many (if not most) of the technology projects that I’m working on in 2023. I’m well into it, and I haven’t posted about any of them (yet). One of the reasons is that I’m so deeply absorbed (in the best sense) that I haven’t wanted to \u201cslow down\u201d to blog about them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But, of course, if I don’t post when they’re fresh, I’m not going to get the important details right, and that’s the point of blogging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This post is out of order, since I had a number of successes (and frustrations, but no failures yet!) in my 2023 technology odyssey, and I’m choosing to start with this, which was a number of projects in (but related to many of them). Since this one is over<\/em>, I’m posting it first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, a number of the projects I’m working on (or have in mind) will be running in a VM (each might be in separate VMs). I wanted to run them in a separate physical host, but in my home (technically known as a \u201chome lab\u201d). I bought a machine to dedicate to that (another post coming on that at some point).<\/p>\n\n\n\n I decided that I would install Proxmox<\/a> as the base OS. People call it a bare metal<\/em> hypervisor, but as I’ve learned (I too didn’t know) that it really runs Debian beneath the surface of Proxmox. I read a ton about Proxmox, Xen, XCP-NG, KVM (virt-manager\/virsh and cockpit). On my laptop, I have run VirtualBox for over a dozen years, and even though I’m perfectly comfortable with it, I knew it wouldn’t be my \u201cremote\u201d virtualization server of choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I had no trouble installing Proxmox and getting it up and running. I was annoyed (mildly) by all of the nagging to sign up for a paid subscription, given that I’m running it in a home lab and it’s an open source project. An occasional gentle reminder<\/em> that a support subscription is available<\/em> would be fine, but not what they were doing. That’s not the reason I’m no longer running Proxmox (oh wait, did I need to say spoiler alert<\/strong> before writing that?).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Proxmox is reasonably attractive and reasonably easy to figure out (with tons of documentation and forum posts to help you if you can’t figure it out easily). That’s all good. Except when it isn’t\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n Under the covers, Proxmox runs KVM (just like Xen and XCP-NG). I had a running VM that I wanted to migrate over to Proxmox (supposedly a very easy task). That VM was a Home Assistant OS<\/a> install. It was in qcow2 format (the native format of QEMU<\/a> disks). I was under the impression (apparently incorrectly!) that qemu was the default file format and virtualization engine for all KVM-based systems. I figured I’d merely have to copy over the qcow2 image and \u201cload\u201d it into Proxmox.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nope! I had to convert the qcow2 image into a raw<\/strong> image (easy enough) and then load it in. It loaded fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But did it? Sure, it was correctly loaded into the new VM, but it wouldn’t boot. I spent the next two days (possibly three!), trying every possible combination of things that you could tweak in Proxmox. SeaBIOS (legacy bios boot) and UEFI boot. I booted (successfully) off of CD-ROM ISO images with various bootloaders on them (SuperGRUB, etc.) and also systemrescucd (and some of its kin). Those all booted successfully, so the issue wasn’t the base Proxmox install.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once those CDs were live, I was able to mount the Home Assistant (HA) drive. I tried doing various low-level things to it (updating its grub config among other things). Each time I reverted to booting off of the HA disk, it failed to boot (though after updating grub, I got a little further, as in I was dropped to a grub shell!).<\/p>\n\n\n\n All the while, I was Googling my brains out (almost literally). I followed every piece of advice that other people were getting when they had VMs that weren’t booting. Nothing even came close to working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I had to take a breath and consider why I chose Proxmox to begin with. There were two reasons:<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I spent some time thinking about it, my need for migrating a running VM (and some of the other cool features) were just not things I needed, or was even likely to ever use. I’m not load balancing a big cluster here, just running a few local VMs for specific purposes (the first being Home Automation via HA).<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n