I’ve been playing few months with HA over a Pi5 using Docker, I tested apps for automation, media server and NVR. Using a NAS server instead of adapting the Pi5 may have several pros, therefore I’m now thinking to purchase a 2 bay UGreen NAS and use with TrueNAS. The NAS have resources that can be used to run some of the apps, therefore I was thinking how to distribute them. I understood that Swarm is not maintained anymore, and Kubernets seems overkill for my use.
It make sense to have simply containers running on different servers and connected via network? For example HA running on the Pi5 and Jellifin running on NAS. Will the HA integration work? Will be there performance issues?
Provided you get the port mappings and IPs right, it will work exactly the same whether the containers are on the same host or different hosts.
Performance could be better or worse: you’re distributing the load but complicating the link. On a good network, I suspect you’d get better performance overall but probably not notice the difference.
Be sure to pick Truenas SCALE if you want run containers on your NAS.
TrueNAS SCALE actually uses Kubernetes as its container engine, not Docker. But it’s probably transparent for the user (never tried myself).
Also, I considered TrueSCALE the last time I rebuilt my NAS, but it’s not very flexible and, although great for security, it basically mirrors by default. That means that your 2 disks NAS will only offer the capacity of 1.
There is no reason why all services, including HA integrations, won’t work on distributed docker containers vs co-located containers, assuming you have the port mappings setup correctly for access to the wired network as noted above.
If you want something to manage docker containers across multiple servers but without full-on clustering, maybe take a look at Komodo, which is like a multi-server portainer with integrated watchtower.
Thanks @koying, however I learned that since last October the SCALE version moved to Docker. I shall study more about this OS, especially the ZFS file system.
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Nice hint, thanks a lot @peterxian
After few days playing with it I have to say that looks quite good but really young for a noobie like me. I had to dig hard to understand how to configure, the documentation should be improved and I found strange behaviours. The fact that I must run it as root also make me cautious. I think I’ll come back to it in future.