my two bare metal servers are the file server and music server. I have other services in a pi cluster.

file server because I can’t think of why I would need to use a container.

the music software is proprietary and requires additional complications to get it to work properly…or at all, in a container. it also does not like sharing resources and is CPU heavy when playing to multiple sources.

if either of these machines die, a temporary replacement can be sourced very easily(e.g. the back of my server closet) and recreated from backups while I purchase new or fix/rebuild the broken one.

IMO the only reliable method for containers is a cluster because if you’re running several containers on a device and it fails you’ve lost several services.