Portainer VS OpenMediaVault

I'd say that going from Docker Compose to Docker Swarm is the first logical step, because it's included in a Docker install and also uses the same Compose format (with more parameters, such as deployment constraints, like which node hostname or tag you want a certain container to be scheduled on): https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/compose-file-v3... That said, you won't see lots of Docker Swarm professionally anymore - it's just the way the job market is, despite it being completely sufficient for many smaller projects out there, I'm running it in prod successfully so far and it's great.

Another reasonably lightweight alternative would be Hashicorp Nomad, because it's free, simple to deploy and their HCL format isn't too bad either, as long as you keep things simple, in addition to them supporting more than just container workloads: https://www.hashicorp.com/products/nomad That said, if you don't buy into HashiStack too much, then there won't be too much benefit from learning HCL and translating the contents of various example docker-compose.yml files that you see in a variety of repos out there, although their other tools are nice - for example, Consul (a service mesh). This is a nice but also a bit niche option.

Lastly, there is Kubernetes. It's complicated, even more so when you get into solutions like Istio, typically eats up lots of resources, can be difficult to manage and debug, but does pretty much anything that you might need, as long as you have either enough people to administer it, or a wallet that's thick enough for you to pay one of the cloud vendors to do it for you. Personally, I'd look into the lightweight clusters at first, like k0s, MicroK8s, or perhaps the K3s project in particular: https://k3s.io/

I'd also suggest that if you get this far, don't be afraid to look into options for dashboards and web based UIs to make exploring things easier:

  - for Docker Swarm and Kubernetes there is Portainer: https://www.portainer.io/

Portainer - Makes managing my homelab, gateway and (Pi0) DNS server extremely easy and fun. Traefik - Great companion for the above. For those who don't know for some reason - a simple, yet extremely powerful reverse proxy. Docker - Should be obvious, but I would feel bad if I didn't give it a shoutout. If you haven't heard of it - go and learn, please, it'll make your life beautiful.

Portainer - Web UI for managing Docker Containers

> Why there are needs to use docker GUIs?

Because to some people using GUIs are more approachable and in some case objectively better (e.g. telling the state of things at a glance and efficiently using screen real estate, with graphs and whatnot), whereas the ways they're worse in might not dealbreakers (e.g. lack of automation, given that there can still be APIs or access to the underlying cluster anyways).

For an example of this, see pieces of software that one can use to manage orchestrators:

- Portainer: https://www.portainer.io/

- Rancher: https://www.rancher.com/products/rancher

Some orchestrators even include dashboards on their own:

- Kubernetes dashboard: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/access-application-cluster/...

- Nomad web UI: https://developer.hashicorp.com/nomad/tutorials/web-ui

And some of that applies to running regular containers and managing them locally: for many it can be useful to be able to just click around to discover more details about a container, as well as what's using storage and so on. Thankfully the CLIs of Docker and competing runtimes are pretty well structured as they are, but I guess it's just a different type of UX.

At the end of the day, what works for you, or even what you find comfortable to use, might not be the case for someone else and vice versa. It's definitely nice to have that choice in the first place, and to know the various options out there.

- Portainer

Breaking it down a bit more: - 'handle_path /docker/' means to handle on calls to http://example.tailnet-def456.ts.net/docker/ - 'reverse_proxy / portainer:9000' means to reverse proxy those calls to "portainer" (that's the container name on the docker network) on port 9000. That's where I have hosted my docker manager (https://www.portainer.io/)

From purely an administration standpoint, I'd recommend Cockpit. For Docker, I'd also recommend Portainer. Maybe for Minecraft, try out Pterodactyl - I personally haven't used it myself but I've heard good things about it.

Portainer - Web UI for managing Docker Containers

I thought it was related to this issue at first: https://github.com/openmediavault/openmediavault/pull/746

If you have enough budget and do not want to break your fingers, then consider Synology or QNAP NAS. Otherwise, building your own server is fascinating. With a DIY server, you can deploy XPenology https://xpenology.org/ or alternative solutions like Openmediavault, https://www.openmediavault.org/, Starwinds SAN and NAS https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas-free or any Linux distributive you like and configure ZFS or mdadm.

I physically built my 1st NAS and put (openmediavault) on it - that does most things.

https://www.openmediavault.org/ looks interesting in terms of NAS software

I’d be wary of using TrueNAS as a first time build due to it’s poor expansion options - replace all disks in turn or add a new vdev. There’s no expanding vdevs at the current time like you can a mdadm RAID array. I’d be more inclined to run OMV (as the download is a Debian base) and potentially move to Scale later on once you know your true storage requirements and can afford to acquire all disks upfront. OMV is good to build bit by bit (I’m not convinced by Unraid). 2 x 10TB mirror -> 3 x 10TB RAID5 -> 4 x 10TB RAID5 or 6 etc.

As nas os running inside of the cluster you can look into something like TrueNAS (https://www.truenas.com/), OMV (https://www.openmediavault.org/) or Starwinds san and nas, they have also guide for hyper-v setup (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-san-and-nas/)

Say, unraid (unraid.net/), openmediavault (https://www.openmediavault.org/) and TrueNAS (https://www.truenas.com/truenas-core/). Allow for ZFS support with right plugin in place. Let us leave the ZFS/Open ZFS aside for this thread.

First of all, the server is great. Skylake-gen of CPUs is still great, with great NICs (best Intel NIC, IMO) and a good enough RAID controller. However, single Silver Xeon w/ 8 cores and 2.1 GHz frequency will most likely be a bottleneck compared with your primary node. I would turn it into a NAS. Just drop there a TrueNAS or Starwinds SAN and NAS or OMV and share the storage to your primary server via NFS or iSCSI. You can even drop ESXi on the T440, add this node to the cluster (to manage the server via a single console - vCenter) and deploy the NAS application as the VM.