Hello, at the moment I have a system with very limited resources (i7 laptop with 8gigs) Im waiting for 2* 8tb segate drives to be my nas drives. I’m planning to move to a PC with i5 9400 and 8gigs Right now the proxmox has home assistant os and Open media vault with not much on it. I want to move my system to containers and would love a thought about the design. Container 1: homeassistant and esp home and smart home Dockers. Container 2: unifi network controller and pi hole and network related Dockers. Container 3: just smb share with the 2 drives as zfs drive that proxmox will manage and might add rsync later on. I’m planning that the containers will use the smb share as they’re all on the same machine and I think VirtIo will be fast enough for them to access the shared folder to save the logs and data for each docker. also i want to have tailscale to access it remotely, so should i add this for each container or one with network routes?
edit: also i would have plex should i have it with the smb container or somewhere else?
It isn’t clear to me exactly what you’re suggesting as a potential approach: when you say “containers,” are you referring to LXC containers on Proxmox, the Docker containers themselves, or a Proxmox VM?
In general, if you’re planning to use containers, Docker or LXC, I’d give each service/app it’s own container. With LXC, this would be a separate container defined in Proxmox for each service. If you’re going the Docker route, I’d create one VM in which you configure and run your Docker containers. You can run Docker in LXC, but it’s not officially supported.
Given the relatively limited RAM on either of your systems, I think going with containers (Docker or LXC) to make the most of the available resources makes sense.
If you’re running this all on the same box you could create an internal network bridge for all of the machines to communicate over, although (and someone can correct me if I’m wrong), I think Proxmox will route all inter-VM/container traffic internally even if they are on a vm bridge associated with a network card.
I am partial to using LXC, so if I were to set this up on my system (and I do have some of these services running), I would probably take the following approach:
- Home Assistant VM, one approach to setup
- UniFi controller LXC
- Pi-Hole LXC
- Samba file server LXC (will likely need to be privileged)
- Plex in LXC (will need to be privileged to mount smb)
- Whatever other services you want in LXC
Re: Tailscale, I haven’t used it (found the inability to connect to only a single network constraining and have gone with a combination of LAN, VPN, and ZeroTier that all point to a common reverse proxy) so can’t comment on connecting individual VM/containers vs their subnet router, but my impression is that you need the former to take advantage of features like Magic DNS.