Home Server. Worth containerising?

Associate
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I've got a HP Prolight microserver Gen7.
It's had a rather long history of OS's installed on it. Win Server 2008 R2, ESXI (hosting Win server 2008 R2 & Centos), Proxmox (ubuntu containers & fullfat OS).
I've recently had my main LVM corrupt, taking with it my CCTV software and network storage (thankfully I have that backed up on my PC HDD still)

Anyway, baring in mind this is a relatively low spec server ( AMD Turion II Processor Model Neo N54L + 8GB of RAM), I'm thinking of just having Ubuntu installed on there. However I'm still wondering if containerising would be smarter.
It has to run a few jobs you see
  • Shinobi CCTV (Maybe zoneminder, but leaning towards Shinobi)
  • Network Storage (Media and File)
  • Plex
  • NodeJS
  • Possibly Jenkins
Would it be smarter to have separation using containers or do you think it's over-complicating it and just jam it all on the main server.
I know Shinobi has to be on the main server at the moment as they don't really support LXC\LXD containers (though they do support docker)

And, is it worth using LVM's ? I'm not 100% sure which of the four HDD's might be on its way out, but something is.

EDIT: tbh is it worth just having something like FREENAS on there? Does Freenas have CCTV Software?
 
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Soldato
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Why not just run docker under ubuntu on it? It's pretty easy to just set up docker and you say that the CCTV software supports running under docker, one of my colleagues runs Plex under docker and that works fine for him and I suspect that there are docker containers for Jenkins and Nodejs ...
 
Associate
OP
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Despite my work using docker to power a bunch of their tools, I actually have never used it before. I've got experience in using older versions of OpenVZ and LXC. Suppose it will be a decent learning exercise seeing as docker is kind of the more used system
 
Associate
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I used LXD containers a lot on my n54l. I think it just makes everything easier easy to reboot containers if you need to upgrade something, easy to restrict cpu/memory usage per container. Keeps the containers isolated so they can only have a limited impact on the rest of the server.
 
Soldato
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UnRaid’s VM/Docker support is really easy to get along with - I ran Plex/Radarr/Sonarr/DelugeVPN+Privoxy/RClone/Sab/Unifi controller and an Ubuntu VM on my N54L, obviously RAR/PAR work is CPU limited and i'd suggest setting it not to hog the CPU if you go down that route, an SSD cache drive allows the dockers/VM's to run smoothly and if you're IO heavy you can always mount/direct pass through another SSD to the VM. The trial licence is free and it's arguably the best value for money i've had from an OS ever (12+ years of updates and massively expanded features).

Failing that ubuntu as a docker host works....
 
Associate
OP
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No I haven't, truth be told.
It's 8Gb of ECC memory so I'd like to think it's pretty stable. It's worth checking anyway though...
 
Don
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Docker is amazing, I use it a lot in work.... I run a K8s cluster, well a couple and starting to get into RKT as well...

I have thought about containerising plex over a couple of nodes and using a NFS backend to host the media files :)

Stelly
 
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