April and May’s been a busy time for both technically for work, and at home with JT-LAB stuff. Work’s been crazy with me working through 3 consecutive weekends to get a software release out the door, and on top of that working to some pretty crazy requests recently from clients.
I had the opportunity to partially implement a one-node version of my previous plans, and ran some personal tests with one server running as a singular node, and a similarly configured server with just docker instances.
I think I can confidently say that for my personal needs, until I get something incredibly complicated going, sticking to a dockerised format for hosting all my sites is my preferred method to go. I thought I’d write out some of the pros and cons I felt applied here:
The Pros of using HA Proxmox
- Uptime
- Security (everyone is fenced off into their own VM)
The Cons of using HA Proxmox
- Hardware requirements – I need at least 3 nodes or an odd number of nodes to maintain quorum. Otherwise I need a QDevice.
- My servers idle at something between 300 and 500 watts of power;
- this equates to approximately about $150 per quarter on my power bill, per server.
- Speed – it’s just not as responsive as I’d like, and to hop between sites to do maintenance (as I’m a one-man shop) requires me to log out and in to various VMs.
- Backup processes – I can backup the entire image. It’s not as quick as I’d hoped it to be when I backup and restore a VM in case of critical failure.
The Pros of using Docker
- Speed – it’s all on the one machine, nothing required to move between various VMs
- IP range is not eaten up by various VMs
- Containers use as much or as little as they need to operate
- Backup Processes are simple, I literally can just do a directory copy of the docker mount as I see fit
- Hardware requirements – I have the one node, which should be powerful enough to run all the sites;
- I’ve acquired newer Dell R330 servers which idle at around 90 watts of power
- this would literally cut my power bill per server down by 66% per quarter
The Cons of using Docker
- Uptime is not as guaranteed – with a single point of failure, the server going down would take down ALL sites that I host
- Security – yes I can jail users as needed; but if someone breaks out, they’ve got access to all sites and the server itself
All in all, the pros of docker kind of outweigh everything. The cons can be fairly easily mitigated; based off how fast I file copy things or can flick configurations across to another server (of which I will have some spare sitting around)
I’ve been a little bit burnt out from life over May and April, not to mention I caught COVID during the end of April into the start of May; I ended up taking a week unpaid leave, and combined with a fresh PC upgrade – so the finances have been a bit stretched in the budget.
Time to start building up that momentum again and get things rolling. Acquiring dual Dell R330 servers means I have some 1RU newer gen hardware machines to move to; freeing up some of the older hardware, and the new PC build also frees up some other resources.
Exciting Times 😂