Docker Users? Thoughts on NFS mounted config volumes.

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JimPhreak

Active Member
Oct 10, 2013
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I thought you where looking for a way to have your Dockerized Plex have access to your UnRAID volume (slow) and a remote VPN (slow). I never suggested using mergerfs for anything other than that container for mounting your bulk media.

Your future SSD array that should be local on your Docker host and would only use mergerfs to pool those two slower volumes to share to your Plex container. Maybe I misunderstood your desired outcome.

I never suggested replacing UnRAID with SnapRAID. I suggested pooling the two slow NFS shares into one volume with mergerfs to share to your a Plex container. I'm not sure that you are understanding what I'm describing to you as none of this would ever require rebuilding or changing your OS in the future.
It is me who misunderstood how mergerfs works. I'm new to Linux so I wasn't fully understanding how FUSE and was thinking that my entire array would have to use mergerfs as it's core FS. Do you have any thoughts on what would be a high performing FS in terms of read/write for my SSD server that I could use mergerfs in conjunction with?
 

rubylaser

Active Member
Jan 4, 2013
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It is me who misunderstood how mergerfs works. I'm new to Linux so I wasn't fully understanding how FUSE and was thinking that my entire array would have to use mergerfs as it's core FS. Do you have any thoughts on what would be a high performing FS in terms of read/write for my SSD server that I could use mergerfs in conjunction with?
No big deal, I just thought I completely missed the boat on your goals :) What I use for a high performance filesystem on Linux is ZFS on Linux. I use this for my host OS (and Docker containers) and virtualization platform (Proxmox). The mix of ZFS for all of my fast media and SnapRAID (UnRAID in your case) for my bulk media has worked really well for me.

You will just need to determine if you'd like to use a RAID10 or RAID5 setup with your 4 SSDs (I think that was your plan from the other thread). With spinning disks, RAID5 on ZFS sucks for VMs because your are limited to the IOPS of a single disk, but for SSD platforms, that's not so much of an issue. So, you will just need to determine if you'd like to have the true RAID10 speeds and benefits of not using parity at all or go RAID5 and be able to use an extra 480GB of storage space on your SSD array.
 

JimPhreak

Active Member
Oct 10, 2013
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No big deal, I just thought I completely missed the boat on your goals :) What I use for a high performance filesystem on Linux is ZFS on Linux. I use this for my host OS (and Docker containers) and virtualization platform (Proxmox). The mix of ZFS for all of my fast media and SnapRAID (UnRAID in your case) for my bulk media has worked really well for me.

You will just need to determine if you'd like to use a RAID10 or RAID5 setup with your 4 SSDs (I think that was your plan from the other thread). With spinning disks, RAID5 on ZFS sucks for VMs because your are limited to the IOPS of a single disk, but for SSD platforms, that's not so much of an issue. So, you will just need to determine if you'd like to have the true RAID10 speeds and benefits of not using parity at all or go RAID5 and be able to use an extra 480GB of storage space on your SSD array.
I'm thinking a RAID10 array is what I'll go with, it's kind of what I've been planning on from the start.

With you using ZFS, SnapRAID, MergeRFS, Proxmox, and of course Docker all in the same system, do you find it difficult to quickly manage your server on a daily basis? That was a big reason I went with UnRAID to begin with was because I'm not very familiar with Linux and could manage everything quite easily through the Gui. I know Proxmox has a pretty good web interface but do you manage any of your other setups (ZFS, SnapRAID, Docker) though any kind of Gui?
 

rubylaser

Active Member
Jan 4, 2013
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Michigan, USA
I'm thinking a RAID10 array is what I'll go with, it's kind of what I've been planning on from the start.

With you using ZFS, SnapRAID, MergeRFS, Proxmox, and of course Docker all in the same system, do you find it difficult to quickly manage your server on a daily basis? That was a big reason I went with UnRAID to begin with was because I'm not very familiar with Linux and could manage everything quite easily through the Gui. I know Proxmox has a pretty good web interface but do you manage any of your other setups (ZFS, SnapRAID, Docker) though any kind of Gui?
I'm not actually using SnapRAID and MergerFS on the same machine anymore. I've broken my Proxmox machine back out from my Fileserver (SnapRAID, MergerFS, and all my Docker containers). My Fileserver runs Ubuntu 14.04.3 64-bit server, and I have no problem managing it. Everything is scripted and I hardly ever touch it other than to occasionally restart Docker containers with new versions of Plex come out, etc. That's as easy as...
Code:
docker restart plex
There is a learning curve to manage Linux from the command line, but the things you are planning on doing are not too difficult and there are a number of great learning resources to figure things out.
 

JimPhreak

Active Member
Oct 10, 2013
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I'm not actually using SnapRAID and MergerFS on the same machine anymore. I've broken my Proxmox machine back out from my Fileserver (SnapRAID, MergerFS, and all my Docker containers). My Fileserver runs Ubuntu 14.04.3 64-bit server, and I have no problem managing it. Everything is scripted and I hardly ever touch it other than to occasionally restart Docker containers with new versions of Plex come out, etc. That's as easy as...
Code:
docker restart plex
There is a learning curve to manage Linux from the command line, but the things you are planning on doing are not too difficult and there are a number of great learning resources to figure things out.
The docker piece I'm already somewhat familiar with as I have successfully testing bringing up my Plex docker on Ubuntu using mounted NFS shares to my remote backup UnRAID server. So the docker commands I'm pretty comfortable with.

My main concern is managing the state of my disk arrays via command line. I'm pretty busy on a daily basis and feel without a Gui to quickly check on disk stats, health status, etc. that management will fall by the way side. And since I'm not familiar enough with Linux to be able to script things at this point and make management easy on myself, that could be an issue. It's a piece of mind thing. I like to be able to check on my servers daily from say my smartphone on the couch without having to interpret command line results.
 

rubylaser

Active Member
Jan 4, 2013
846
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Michigan, USA
The docker piece I'm already somewhat familiar with as I have successfully testing bringing up my Plex docker on Ubuntu using mounted NFS shares to my remote backup UnRAID server. So the docker commands I'm pretty comfortable with.

My main concern is managing the state of my disk arrays via command line. I'm pretty busy on a daily basis and feel without a Gui to quickly check on disk stats, health status, etc. that management will fall by the way side. And since I'm not familiar enough with Linux to be able to script things at this point and make management easy on myself, that could be an issue. It's a piece of mind thing. I like to be able to check on my servers daily from say my smartphone on the couch without having to interpret command line results.
For a ZFS array, I thought you were checking our Gea's Napp-it? It provides all of the ZFS management functions including managing disks, scheduling scrubs, SMART data, etc. so you can have ZFS and still use a GUI. I'm glad to hear you already tested with Plex in Ubuntu. Portability is a great feature of Docker. Now, give it a try using a mergerfs pool between your local and remote vpn NFS mounts ;) I'm looking forward to see how well that works.
 

JimPhreak

Active Member
Oct 10, 2013
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For a ZFS array, I thought you were checking our Gea's Napp-it? It provides all of the ZFS management functions including managing disks, scheduling scrubs, SMART data, etc. so you can have ZFS and still use a GUI. I'm glad to hear you already tested with Plex in Ubuntu. Portability is a great feature of Docker. Now, give it a try using a mergerfs pool between your local and remote vpn NFS mounts ;) I'm looking forward to see how well that works.
This goes back to my Linux noobness. I didn't realize I'd be able to run Napp-it along with mergerfs and docker on the same system since Napp-it runs on OmniOS.

I will give mergerfs a test this weekend in my Ubuntu VM and report back.
 

JimPhreak

Active Member
Oct 10, 2013
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Napp-it is available for Ubuntu as well :)
Gea has stated the following in the past though:

"Restrictions:

Linux is not my preferred or main platform. Many napp-it features rely on Solaris projects like the CIFS server with full Windows SID and ACL support, Comstar iSCSI or Crossbow network virtualisation. A napp-it version with similar functionality like on OmniOS is currently not planned."
 

rubylaser

Active Member
Jan 4, 2013
846
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Michigan, USA
Gea has stated the following in the past though:

"Restrictions:

Linux is not my preferred or main platform. Many napp-it features rely on Solaris projects like the CIFS server with full Windows SID and ACL support, Comstar iSCSI or Crossbow network virtualisation. A napp-it version with similar functionality like on OmniOS is currently not planned."
That's true, but all of the standard ZFS disk management options work as well as SMART monitoring, scrubbing, etc. Just give it a try in the same VM you tryout mergerfs in. For basic ZFS management, it will work fine :)

Or, you can use something super simple like this
zfswatcher
 
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JimPhreak

Active Member
Oct 10, 2013
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That's true, but all of the standard ZFS disk management options work as well as SMART monitoring, scrubbing, etc. Just give it a try in the same VM you tryout mergerfs in. For basic ZFS management, it will work fine :)
Sounds like a plan :). I have some time anyway as I'm now leaning towards buying a wave-2 Xeon-D board for this build and selling my X10SDV-TLN4F.
 

rubylaser

Active Member
Jan 4, 2013
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Michigan, USA
Sounds like a plan :). I have some time anyway as I'm now leaning towards buying a wave-2 Xeon-D board for this build and selling my X10SDV-TLN4F.
Oh, that will be a VERY nice setup when it's complete. The good news is you now have lots of time to test things out and see what works best for you.
 

epicurean

Active Member
Sep 29, 2014
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Sorry to rehash this , but can anyone help me mount a Napp It NFS share in Ubuntu Server 16.04? It is to provide storage for a docker Zoneminder installation I planned.
From what I understand , I should successfully mount the NFS share before installing the Zoneminder docker right?
 

IamSpartacus

Well-Known Member
Mar 14, 2016
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Sorry to rehash this , but can anyone help me mount a Napp It NFS share in Ubuntu Server 16.04? It is to provide storage for a docker Zoneminder installation I planned.
From what I understand , I should successfully mount the NFS share before installing the Zoneminder docker right?
Mapping NFS shares into Linux is super easy. Just create local directories you want to map your NFS shares to and then use the /etc/fstab file to create persistent mounts that will mount the NFS shares upon each bootup.

You will then attach those "local" directories that you've mapped your NFS shares to in your docker create/run file.