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Highly Available Docker Apps?


IamSpartacus

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Posted

Does anyone here run their docker apps in a high availability configuration?  Or at least sync their appdata to a secondary server so that the dockers can be brought up quickly in the case of a failure on Server A?

 

I'm brainstorming of a way to make my Plex server highly available running as a docker on UnRAID.  Right now I run Plex in a Linux VM as I can easily bring that VM up on another host.  Docker is trickier as I'd have to replicate all the Plex appdata to a second host and that takes FOREVER with all the nested directories Plex creates.

 

Wonder what others are doing to maintain maximum uptime of their docker applications.

Posted

What you need is some kind of drive cluster that maps/connects the server and if the OS becomes unresponsive, it switches over to the other server/node. Then you just need to spin up those Dockers on the 2nd server and should be good to go.

 

In theory.

Posted
46 minutes ago, jbartlett said:

What you need is some kind of drive cluster that maps/connects the server and if the OS becomes unresponsive, it switches over to the other server/node. Then you just need to spin up those Dockers on the 2nd server and should be good to go.

 

In theory.

 

I'm aware of the ways to make servers highly available as that's what I currently have with my 3 node closer.  However I'm looking to consolidate my hardware into one AIO server at my house.  I have a secondary server in a different physical location that backs up all my data.  However, I haven't found an efficient way to sync my Plex data between multiple servers.  Rsync/Samba is too slow going file by file.  I think my best option might be to run my dockers inside a Linux VM on UnRAID.  That way I can just sync the vdisks between servers.

Posted

Check out Beyond Compare by Scooter Software. You can create a batch file that'll instruct it to mirror a directory and then schedule that batch file to run via your PC's choice scheduler. It's very fast with it's copy and if you utilize FTP, it can perform the sync with x number of connections to maximize your connection.

Posted
8 hours ago, IamSpartacus said:

However, I haven't found an efficient way to sync my Plex data between multiple servers.  Rsync/Samba is too slow going file by file.  I think my best option might be to run my dockers inside a Linux VM on UnRAID.  That way I can just sync the vdisks between servers.

 

If copying vdisks is an option, how about creating a vdisk for your plex appdata? You could store it on your cache drive and mount it in the go script.

Posted
13 minutes ago, ljm42 said:

 

If copying vdisks is an option, how about creating a vdisk for your plex appdata? You could store it on your cache drive and mount it in the go script.

 

That is an intriguing idea.  I didn't realize you could moun vdisks in UnRAID.  Would the vdisk be locked while mounted since it's technically live and changes are constantly being made?

Posted
26 minutes ago, IamSpartacus said:

That is an intriguing idea.  I didn't realize you could moun vdisks in UnRAID.  Would the vdisk be locked while mounted since it's technically live and changes are constantly being made?

 

Yeah, I'd think so too

Posted
4 minutes ago, IamSpartacus said:

Yea that wouldn't work as it would never be unmounted in order to facilitate a duplication.

 

Oh I thought you had a solution for that since you mentioned copying vdisks for a VM? Wouldn't that have the same issue?

Posted
Just now, ljm42 said:

 

Oh I thought you had a solution for that since you mentioned copying vdisks for a VM? Wouldn't that have the same issue?

 

I honestly haven't dived into it deep enough yet.  The way I backup my VMware VMs now (Veeam) it live snapshots them and I can use those snapshot backups to restore the VM to any host at any time.  I'll have to see if there are any KVM backup solutions that can do something similar though my gut tells me no.

 

 

Posted

It is an interesting project, I'll be curious to hear what you end up doing. 

 

Although in my experience, my server only goes down when I am doing maintenance. I think if I tried to tell my wife I needed a second server for high availability Plex, she'd just tell me to schedule maintenance after hours. LOL

Posted
Just now, ljm42 said:

It is an interesting project, I'll be curious to hear what you end up doing. 

 

Although in my experience, my server only goes down when I am doing maintenance. I think if I tried to tell my wife I needed a second server for high availability Plex, she'd just tell me to schedule maintenance after hours. LOL

 

Haha I hear you.  I didn't build my second server for high availability though, it's used to backup my main server.  But it wouldn't cost me anything extra to run my dockers off it if my server fails or needs to be down for extended maintenance. 

Posted

Oh I see. Yeah if your backup server is capable of running apps that makes a lot of sense to want to use it

 

Here's a crazy idea, assuming the second server is onsite... you could put your appdata on an external drive. Then when you shut off the main server you would physically move the external drive to the backup server :)  Kind of feels like cheating, but it could be an option

Posted
1 minute ago, ljm42 said:

Oh I see. Yeah if your backup server is capable of running apps that makes a lot of sense to want to use it

 

Here's a crazy idea, assuming the second server is onsite... you could put your appdata on an external drive. Then when you shut off the main server you would physically move the external drive to the backup server :)  Kind of feels like cheating, but it could be an option

 

Backup server is located in a totally different location connected via a Site-to-Site VPN. 

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