unRAID simply for Docker and management UI
I'm running unRAID on an HP Microserver stuffed with 4TB drives and a cache SSD today. Now that I'm working from home, I have grown tired of the noise, even though it's not that loud. Also, I'm only using 650GB of the 12TB on the array. I love the Docker capabilities and the Community Apps "store" included with unRAID.
I also have a NUC with 256GB M.2 and a 2TB SATA SSD that I was planning to build out Ubuntu and run Docker with Portainer to manage containers. That's turned out to be a lot more work to maintain and manually set up containers compared to the experience on unRAID.
I'd like to try to run unRAID on the NUC but with no real array to speak of; no parity disk etc. I don't care too much about the data on my array now as it's mostly media that can be re-obtained if necessary. Does anyone have experience running unRAID in this fashion or alternative recommendations for a simpler, more streamlined container management experience?
Many thanks!
If you just need a docker interface, check out Portainer. It is itself a docker container as well which is neat.
I run it without parity, and everything works fine. Unraid is very modular, just use what you need.
You might want to take a look at https://cockpit-project.org gives a GUI and easy (docker) usage and keeps it manageable.
If you have $60 bucks to spare, then sure go for it
this is exactly what i do and how i use unraid. no redundancy since its all containers, they are backed up to a dumb nas nightly in case of a failure.
I used it for a while in a similar sense to what gamersnexus did with running ZFS while on unraid just because using docker on freenas is a massive pain in the ass and the built in plugins just were nowhere near where I’d like them to be. While I actually kept up my ZFS array I eventually caved and just went to built in array for unraid because my needs changed and it turned into a glorified seedbox.
There are other ways to handle docker management but if you’re looking for a dedicated box with point and click management unraid is hard to beat in most situations. Just might be a bit much dropping money for the software solution but if it works it works.
Honestly it's hard to beat unRAID's docker setup for the simple fact that there is loads of support and it does have a nice easy way to add dockers. Just spin it up and try it out, I wouldn't worry about parity, just setup an array with your drives and have at it.
That’s extremely wasteful to run unraid simply for Dockers. You’d be better off running headless server like Ubuntu or something
Why not move the server somewhere you wouldn't hear it? Imo, that's one of the main benefits of a headless server. Put it in a closet or garage.
I would suggest doing what you said in the 2nd paragraph: build an Ubuntu server and use that. It's really not that hard to do. Use google docs to document your docker strings so if you need to redo a docker (for instance) you have the string to just copy and paste. Use Portainer to manage, and watchtower to automatically update.