I bought a 7th gen Intel NUC with i5 and 16gb of ram. I want to experiment with containers and vm’s. What are your recommendations for the host OS ? I’ve looked at RancherOS but it seems I can’t just use the Home-Assistant docker container. Ideally I want to run containers and VM’s.
Shoudl I go with Ubuntu server minimal and Portainer ? RancherOS with RancherVM ?
You asked for an OS, that can be used for virtual machines and Docker containers. I’d recommend plain Ubuntu. If you want to do only containers, I’d would also go with Ubuntu or with CoreOS.
Portainer to my knowledge is a container management tool, not an OS.
Don’t know why. I’d expected to run Docker containers everywhere with a valid Linux kernel.
I’m running 2 on Ubuntu 16.04LTS (headless server) with Portainer. I’ve run Ubuntu for years and feel fairly comfortable with it so that is the primary reason I chose it.
I use plain old Fedora desktop, and it handles both Docker and full virtualization perfectly.
I have 6 or 7 docker containers running all the time, and I use virtualization (qemu w/ KVM, handled by virt-manager) to run Windows 10 with VGA passthrough – but not much else these days.
What I did so far:
Happy so far !
The beauty of docker is that you aren’t limited by OS. But if you want to experiment with VMs, maybe install ESXi or Proxmox on the bare metal then use something absolutely minimal as the Docker host VM? (I’m thinking either Debian 9 or Centos 7 minimal installs with Docker installed on top and nothing else).