I will be installing OpenSuse on this hw: HPE Proliant DL380 G7 with 144GB DDR3 RAM and 2x2.6GHz XEON CPU - upgradeable to 3.4GHz - and 16 SAS 2’5 drives. Got 2 identical servers that will be clustered if I can manage that.
Hardware requirements have been checked and everything seems to work out. Have tested a Live CD with Leap and it even detected and configured the network, based on 2 Broadcom NIC that other*nix distro have issues with. (Debian).
So, intended usage:
[LIST=|INDENT=2]
[li]Webmin, www.webmin.com[/li][li]Docker - via Podman ?[/li][ul]
[li]Nextcloud[/li][li]Matomo[/li][li]Firewall (probably OPNSense but I am also considering a separate box for this)[/li][li]Traefik[/li][li]Ubiquiti UNMS[/li][li]Sphinx[/li][li]MySQL + PHP (Nginx/MariaDB) web lab. Wordpress - Piwigo etc…[/li][li]etc…[/li][/ul]
[/LIST]
So when I say Docker some people say I should go Tumbleweed since it has better support for later versions of Podman - 2. Opinions about that? Leap “only” has Podman 1.
I am REALLY hoping for this to come together without to much hands on fixing in conf files and such. Then I will be asking here, probably a lot. Some Docker distros have terrible docs, other better, and many are to me rather incomprehensible. But first thing is first… Leap or TW?
Uhm, why even bother with docker? I would go right for kubernetes. CPUs are kind of thin and you will lose some millis to kube infra. But if you plan on clustering, then docker will not get you far.
That said, if you plan on running containers in a productive setup, then aim for stability instead of latest. Most of my clients are still on RHEL7 with docker 1.13. That combo has it quirks but it does run reliably serving thousands of users. Next major upgrade will be RHEL8 and whatever podman version that provides. Frankly, I do not care as long as kubernetes supports that.
So, I would go for Rancher on top of SLES or, if it has to be subscriptionless, whatever is nearest to SLES. I guess that would be Leap, though I am not sure.
The major issue with TW is not the possibility of a bad upgrade. For a server that needs to run 24x7 the issue is the frequent restarts, usually at least 1x/week.
I don’t have experience with kubernetes but it seems a sensible approach, especially if you have dependencies among containers. podman supports the same yaml that kubernetes supports, so that’s better than the docker-compose approach.
So even though I like TW best, I see the more sensible options being:
Unless you have in-depth knowledge about how to setup a Kubernetes cluster in a production environment - in a secure manner - you’re opening up a massive can of worms compared to running on Docker (Swarm) - even if you use Rancher and k3s, you’re still looking at a horribly insecure setup out of the box if you do it wrong.
All I know it is some kind of parallell or related system to docker… Don’t you need kubernetes images for apps then as well?
The Clustering is unimportant in this context, Webmin has this interface where you can join servers for some kind of collaboration/redundancy/clustering but I haven’t looked in to it a lot.
