Using RancherOS on bare metal install as host with multiple mounted disks

Rancher 1.x
1

Hi,

I am teaching myself container orchestration and dev op skils and have been playing with Rancher for about a year on and off.

I am finally in the position to set up stuff at home and have the following set up planned/being set up:

HP MicroServer Gen 8

  • Running RancherOS as bare-metal
  • 1x 120Gb SSD (boot device)
  • 1x 300Gb HDD
  • 2x 1Tb Hdd
    4x Raspberry Pi’s (Jenkins+Rundeck | Rancher | Bind9 | CI Runner)

Now, the Pi’s are fine for setting up; but the HP Server not so much.

I am sure I’m missing something obvious but I would like to use the larger drives on this server in the following way:

1Tb for GitLab
1Tb for NextCloud
300Gb for general demo/dev branch/projects

I can see my drives within my host but when I install GitLab via the catalogue it only gets put on the boot disk.

I’ve just to play around with storage stacks and such but I think I’m diving in to deep.

What I am trying to achieve; have persistence for GitLab and NextCloud and what ever else on the other drives and the containers running on the boot disk. This is so if a stack gets deleted my volumes are not purged and so on…

So, what am I doing wrong/missunderstanding?

1 Like
2

Docker volumes live in whatever disk /var/lib/docker is on, which is normally going to be the boot disk. You can use host bind-mounts to mount an arbitrary directory from the host into the containers, but the catalog items may or may not support that.

3

@vincent; Thank you.

So, I can use docker ... -v /path/to/mnt:/some/app/path ... which is fine (tested briefly last night). However, depending on the stack in the catalogue I might not be able to set that?

I can have a play tonight.

How do people handle this in data center style setups? ie; boot disk and an array of disks? Guessing it’s more manual than using the catalogue?

4

Typically either you’re running in “the cloud” and don’t have this problem because the boot disk is a virtual volume of whatever size you want, or you’re running on your own hardware and use RAID or ZFS to combine multiple physical disks into one logical volume, which you can then point docker at to use as the storage directory.

5

Thank you. Got it working the way I wanted!