I decided to just forge ahead with the migration to the new VM this morning. I must admit, I am a bit surprised at how easy it was, so major kudos, props, and appreciation to the HA devs for building a nice, clean path for migrating to a new instance. Only one hiccup occurred, but it was easily resolved. Details below.
First, I decided to use the qcow appliance for the new ProxMox VM. I then used the directions in this somewhat old post to get the new VM created with the qcow image. Make very sure you select the correct bios for your new VM.
I booted the new VM just to make sure it would start, and then shut it back down since I needed to update my DHCP server to provide the correct static IP.
I then created a full snapshot of my old HA system and downloaded it to my PC. Just in case, I also made a manual copy of the entire config directory to a network share. Turns out this wasn’t necessary. Once done, I shut down the old VM.
In ProxMox, I removed the Z-wave USB dongle from the old VM, and added it to the new one. Next I updated my DHCP server to provide the IP address assigned to my old VM to the MAC address of the new VM.
I booted the new VM. Here is where the “hiccup” happened. Once I could access it from a browser for the onboarding process, I tried to use the option to restore from snapshot. Not exactly sure what happened, but it didn’t work. I just kept getting redirected back to the onboarding page where it wanted me to create a new user.
In the interest of time and simplicity, I went ahead and just created a new user and once logged in to HA, I went to Supervisor…Snapshots. Surprisingly, the snapshot I tried to use with the onboarding process was already listed, so I just restored from it.
This took a while. Not a long while, but definitely several minutes. Just be patient.
Once the restore was completed, like magic, everything was there. I expected integrations and all the usual HA stuff to be there. I was pleasantly surprised that even my SSL certificates were in the right place.
As far as Z-wave, all of the devices showed up in the ZwaveJS gui, and worked immediately. I’m not sure if it went through the interview process or not. Right now, I have a relatively small number of devices (13), so it may have completed the interview process by the time I clicked on the gui.
Once I determined everything appeared to be working correctly, I had the supervisor upgrade HA core to the latest 2021.6 version. That went without issue.
End result: I know have a supported HA install and everything pretty much just worked right out of the box. Again, big thanks to the HA devs for really vetting out the snapshot process to be so thorough.