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Migrating UTM SW Appliance Active/Passive Cluster from Dell PowerEdge R310 to Proxmox-KVM

Hello folks,

we're currently still using very old Dell PowerEdge R310 nodes and Sophos UTM 9.7 (latest) as a SW Appliance in an Active/Passive Cluster.
Each node has 6 NICs whereas 2 use LACP for WAN and 2 more w. Active/Backung Bond on LAN and the other 2 are single interfaces used for HA.
All interfaces have Virtual-NIC enabled with a "Sophos" given Mac address (not the HW NIC MAC).

We'd like to migrate to either: Newer Hardware (like PE R430 or newer, and from 1G NICs to 10G NICs and of course a more powerful CPU, more RAM, faster Disk etc.)

Q1: What are our options to do such a migration?
Q2: I had the idea to move to UTM on Proxmox KVM instead. So buy new beefy hardware and put UTM as a KVM VM on top, using virtio for disk and NIC and having the CPU being either "host" (passed through) or General KVM, whatever is supported here.

Since we have an Active/Passive cluster, so my idea was to shutdown the passive node and bring it up with a backup ans a VM-based passive node again. So beforehand, having the new node "offline" and installing UTM using the backup, then checking wether the NIC setup is correct and in the right order. Then reattaching it, powering it up and hoping that it will see the master and bringing up HA again before trying a failover.

One thing that might be a problem is that our old cluster still uses 32bit PostgresDB whereas a fresh VM would probably directly use 64bit.

Can anyone tell me what our options are or if I have some missing things.

Thank you!



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  • Hi Bob,

    thank you for your answer and the links. Do you think we could also setup a new UTM in a KVM VM, update to the same version and then have it synched as a "new" passive node from a VM to the old physical node too?
    What about the PG mismatch (32bit on the current cluster vs. 64bit on a fresh VM?)

    Cheers - Martin

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  • I don't think the PG mismatch would cause a problem, Martin, so it's worth a try with a KVM VM.  The only issue I remember seeing here was when the VM was defined with one or more virtual NICs that aren't supported.

    Please let us know your result.

    Cheers - Bob

     
    Sophos UTM Community Moderator
    Sophos Certified Architect - UTM
    Sophos Certified Engineer - XG
    Gold Solution Partner since 2005
    MediaSoft, Inc. USA
  • Hi Bob,

    thats why, as far as my research goes, I will go with virtio on Proxmox KVM. They should work and since we already have Virtual-Mac, we only need to make sure to correctly „attach“ the virtual cables to the VM to the right bridge/vlan.

    Cheers, Martin

  • Hey, another question. When we do a backup which we in turn play back into a new VM install - shall we include also site data in the backup?

  • If you're replacing the unit with the KVM solution, Martin, then yes, include everything.

    Cheers - Bob

     
    Sophos UTM Community Moderator
    Sophos Certified Architect - UTM
    Sophos Certified Engineer - XG
    Gold Solution Partner since 2005
    MediaSoft, Inc. USA