Hardware Upgrade and Proxmox 9.1
2025-09-21
With the retirement of another data center stack, I had the opportunity to refresh a piece of iron. I ended up choosing to replace an R530 with eight 3.5-inch drives and the oldest IDRAc in my lab. Thankfully, this time the server arrived from FedEx with only slightly bent rails. I upgraded the server from Windows 2022 to 2025, played around with Windows for a few days, and then decided to try out Proxmox 9.1. Proxmox has come a long way since Proxmox seven. While trying to move virtual machines around after getting my NFS servers, I was seeing the strangest behavior. It turned out that I had plugged in an Ethernet 5e into a ten-gigabit Ethernet. Everything looked fine, but the connections were volatile. The next step in my virtualization adventure was to migrate and upgrade a licensed Windows 10 VM. Once my network situation was resolved, it was just a matter of time before I was able to offload the VM and its drive and get them on the new host. After some Windows updates, I set about getting it upgraded to Windows 11. The process involved:
With the retirement of another data center stack, I had the opportunity to refresh a piece of iron. I ended up choosing to replace an R530 with eight 3.5-inch drives and the oldest IDRAc in my lab. Thankfully, this time the server arrived from FedEx with only slightly bent rails. I upgraded the server from Windows 2022 to 2025, played around with Windows for a few days, and then decided to try out Proxmox 9.1. Proxmox has come a long way since Proxmox seven. While trying to move virtual machines around after getting my NFS servers, I was seeing the strangest behavior. It turned out that I had plugged in an Ethernet 5e into a ten-gigabit Ethernet. Everything looked fine, but the connections were volatile. The next step in my virtualization adventure was to migrate and upgrade a licensed Windows 10 VM. Once my network situation was resolved, it was just a matter of time before I was able to offload the VM and its drive and get them on the new host. After some Windows updates, I set about getting it upgraded to Windows 11. The process involved:
- Adding a virtual TPM
- Adding a virtual EFI Disk
- Switched the BIOS to OVMF
- Used a win 11 usb drive, cleaned up some bad entries in the MBR
- Repaired the MBR
- Converted the disk to GPT using MBR2GPT
- Ran the Windows 11 PC check and verified that everything is order
- Upgraded to Windows 11