ESXI and Docker Drives

[SargentFabulous1]

I have a server I run ESXI on that in ESXI I have a VM that I run Ubuntu Server on which I use to run docker for a lot of services and such. My question is I want to run Plex and Piwigo and other stuff in containers which require large amounts of drive space I have the drive space but my VM is mounted on my SSDs which is mirrored 500GB so I only have enough space for the VM to run the OS on it I have plenty disk drives in the server but for this should I either setup in Ubuntu server a secondary drive which make all the data go from the containers go to or should I just try and move my Ubuntu Server VM to the disk drives if that’s even possible so the space is available natively. What is the best option and how should I go about accomplishing this?

[LIGISTX]

48 minutes ago, SargentFabulous1 said:

I have a server I run ESXI on that in ESXI I have a VM that I run Ubuntu Server on which I use to run docker for a lot of services and such. My question is I want to run Plex and Piwigo and other stuff in containers which require large amounts of drive space I have the drive space but my VM is mounted on my SSDs which is mirrored 500GB so I only have enough space for the VM to run the OS on it I have plenty disk drives in the server but for this should I either setup in Ubuntu server a secondary drive which make all the data go from the containers go to or should I just try and move my Ubuntu Server VM to the disk drives if that’s even possible so the space is available natively. What is the best option and how should I go about accomplishing this?

How are the “other drives” set up? Sounds like you need a VM running as a storage appliance (like truenas… or a Ubuntu VM running ZFS with SMB shares, etc) and just mount that share in the docker container. I did this exact thing in ESXi, although I now use proxmox. VM’s live on boot SSD, all data is in truenas mounted via SMB or NFS shares. 

[SargentFabulous1]

Wow that is such a great idea I’ve never even thought about that. Can I just set up an Ubuntu server vm and then pass through the drives to that and the. Then share them via smb to Portainer. At the moment they aren’t really set up I had two of them in a raid 0 and then connected directly to ESXI and then I did pass through to the Ubuntu Server VM as like a secondary drive but I’ve some issues trying to set it up. 

[LIGISTX]

1 hour ago, SargentFabulous1 said:

Wow that is such a great idea I’ve never even thought about that. Can I just set up an Ubuntu server vm and then pass through the drives to that and the. Then share them via smb to Portainer. At the moment they aren’t really set up I had two of them in a raid 0 and then connected directly to ESXI and then I did pass through to the Ubuntu Server VM as like a secondary drive but I’ve some issues trying to set it up. 

There are a lot of ways to do this…

 

But if you have ESXi, you can virtualize whatever you want, but it seems like your not really doing that? If you only have a single VM, you don’t really need to make this extra complicated with virtualization.

 

But what I am a big proponent of doing is getting an HBA, passing that through via PCIe vt-d I’d you have Intel, I forget what it’s called on AMD, and you pass the HBA through to something like truenas and it will handle nas duties (storage, SMB shares, access restriction via credentials etc etc), and then you mount the SMB share in your Ubuntu VM which is running docker in say /mnt/stuff, and in docker (portainer in your case), you just pass the docker container /mnt/stuff as /stuff or something, then the container can see the data in truenas’s SMB share. 
 

I would maybe do some googleing to find YouTube videos of of all of this. There are many, and many ways to do it. YouTube is FULL of homelab tutorials and ideas. 

[SargentFabulous1]

Thank you so much I’ll definitely have to give that a try I do have other VMs running I’ve just tried to avoid virtualization of TrueNas haven’t really wanted wanted to deal with the ins and out of it right now. Not to mention the fact I have 3 other servers running it in one form or another. After reading about It i might try and do an NFS share from one of those servers to the container. Thank you so much for the help.

[LIGISTX]

1 hour ago, SargentFabulous1 said:

Thank you so much I’ll definitely have to give that a try I do have other VMs running I’ve just tried to avoid virtualization of TrueNas haven’t really wanted wanted to deal with the ins and out of it right now. Not to mention the fact I have 3 other servers running it in one form or another. After reading about It i might try and do an NFS share from one of those servers to the container. Thank you so much for the help.

Virtualized truenas isn’t hard. Just need an HBA to pass through. Then it just works as normal. 
 

But ya, that works. NFS from another server would be fine. But I would definitely look towards consolidating all of your storage in one VM (truenas is a good option…) and have storage fully consolidated and network attach it.