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Is it possible to run a docker host that has no harddrive? (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by Passerby6497@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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So I had a micro PC that was running one of my core services and it only supports NVMe drives. Unfortunately, this little guy cooked itself and I'm not in a position to replace the drive. The system is still good and is fairly powerful, so I want to be able to reuse it.

I'm thinking I want to set up some kind of netboot appliance on another server to be able to allow me to boot the system without ever having a local disk. One thing I want to is run some docker images (specifically Frigate) but i wont be able to write anything to persistent storage locally. NFS shares are common in my setup.

Is it even possible to make a 'gold image' of a docker host and have it netboot? I expect that memory limitations (16GB) will be my main issue, but I'm just trying to think of how to bring this system back into use. I have two NAS appliances that I can use for backend long term storage (where I keep my docker files and non-database files anyway), so it shouldn't be too difficult to have some kind of easily editable storage solution. I don't want to use USB drives as persistent storage due to lifespan concerns from using them in production environments.

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[-] Passerby6497@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

So I amend to you don’t need it to be stateful, you could have an image like you talked about that is loaded every time (that’s essentially what kubernetes does), but you will still need space somewhere as scratch drive. A place docker will places images and temporary file systems while it’s running.

Putting the image somewhere is easy. I've got TBs of space available on my NAS drives, especially right now with not acquiring any additional linux ISOs.

For state, check out docker’s volume backings here: https://docs.docker.com/engine/storage/volumes/. You could use nfs to another server as an example for your volumes. Your volumes would never need to be on your “app server”, but instead could be loaded via nfs from your storage server.

I'll check that out. If that allows me to actually write databases to disk on the nfs backing volume, that would be amazing. That's the biggest issue I run into (regularly).

This is all nearing into kubernetes territory though. If you’re thinking about netboot and automatically starting containers, and handling stateless volumes and storing volumes in a way that are synced with a storage server… it might be time for kubernetes.

I don't think I've ever looked into kubernetes. I'll have to look into that at some point... Any good beginner resources?

[-] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 4 points 3 days ago

Personally I suggest k3s, setting up a test cluster and playing with it. For volume management I use longhorn. It's a HUGE learning curve, but it's officially something companies will shell out big money for too if you're willing to learn it. Soup to nuts from setting up test cluster and playing with it all the way to all of my services running was about 4 months of tinkering for me- but I'll never go back

this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
34 points (90.5% liked)

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