On truenas scale though it’s just tiles in a web browser, it’s super easy. And since it runs on ZFS backups are easier too. Just click your way through periodic volume snapshot tasks.
Definitely a bit of a learning curve but it’s a sleek setup once you understand.
Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 1 year ago
I’m not quite sure what “truenas” is? All of my stuff is individually installed, I decided a long time ago to split it up onto VMs that each perform an specific task. I have a main file server that runs zfs, then two servers to run the redundant VMs. There’s not really anything difficult about backups, I just add a cron job to run a script once a day and never touch it again, so I have backups of each VM but then the backups of the main servers includes the VM image files so each VM gets backed up twice. There’s a lot of info there but the backups of all the critical stuff only use about 6TB (I could actually cut that in half if I got rid of the backups from older machines).
So lets say I put in the time to learn how docker works, and then put in a lot more time converting all of my existing systems over to docker images… What exactly what I get out of all that effort? The thing that nobody’s been able to sell me on so far is that I don’t see how docker is going to make anything any easier, it just seems like it’s a “different” way to do things but nothing more.
cyberpunk007@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Your data footprint would be less. Maintenance is a breeze. If you update your image and it breaks, just roll it back. Less consumption of resources. No need to divide your storage and ram for VMs. There are millions of docker images so you can start something new in seconds. And the learning curve isn’t too bad if you’re on truenas scale. Truenas core is a NAS operating system built on freebsd (Unix), and truenas scale is built on Linux. Both use ZFS for the underlying storage.
Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 1 year ago
OK so my current strategy is that when I want to do a major update I simply make a copy of the vm image file, then I can drop it back in place if something goes wrong. I run KVM which means it just gives out CPU and memory as needed even though I can set maximums. The resources I’m using are laughably small anyway, half the systems run fine on a single cpu core although it was nice to recently bump web and mail services up higher (I just upgraded over the Summer from Poweredge 860 servers to some R620’s – crazy difference in available resources!). Same with memory, I have some systems running on as little as 512M, but I just bumped my web servers up to 8G to give them plenty of room. Considering I have 64G in each server with tons of space for growth, I’m not worried about any of that. And storage space… well it seems linux is suffering with bloat since the introduction of systemd as I’ve had to increase my image files from 4G to 8G for updates, but it’s still a drop in the bucket for storage. And all the services use shared storage space for things like email and websites, and I have around 105TB of shared storage, so again not really a concern.
Now it sounds like I kind of need TrueNas to easily use docker, which means another system that I would need to learn from scratch? Truenas scale says it’s built on debian and yet there are no debian packages available to install it, so I can only assume that I would have to completely replace all of my existing servers with brand new systems that I have no knowledge of troubleshooting, just so I can replace all of my existing VMs with docker images which I also have no knowledge of how to troubleshoot.
Sorry but none of this is selling me on the idea - it just sounds like I’m supposed to replace systems that work perfectly well with new systems that I can’t fix when they break? I’m really not understanding where the advantage is.
cyberpunk007@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Not trying to sell you on it, you do what works best for you. Truenas scale is an operating system built on Debian. There will be no packages for it. It’s hard to explain until you start using it. I came from VMs on truenas core for many years and it was annoying to migrate to docker but after I used it for a while I liked it a lot more. It’s hard to explain without just using it, so if you’re not into playing around and what you have works great, then great. I’ve been working with jails and VMs and containers for well over 15 years since I work in IT so I’ve played with big and small systems. There are definitely some annoyances when it comes to the VM approach.