So I had a micro PC that was running one of my core services and it only supports NVMe drives. Unfortunately, this little guy cooked itself and I’m not in a position to replace the drive. The system is still good and is fairly powerful, so I want to be able to reuse it.
I’m thinking I want to set up some kind of netboot appliance on another server to be able to allow me to boot the system without ever having a local disk. One thing I want to is run some docker images (specifically Frigate) but i wont be able to write anything to persistent storage locally. NFS shares are common in my setup.
Is it even possible to make a ‘gold image’ of a docker host and have it netboot? I expect that memory limitations (16GB) will be my main issue, but I’m just trying to think of how to bring this system back into use. I have two NAS appliances that I can use for backend long term storage (where I keep my docker files and non-database files anyway), so it shouldn’t be too difficult to have some kind of easily editable storage solution. I don’t want to use USB drives as persistent storage due to lifespan concerns from using them in production environments.
How about running the OS from a USB stick? Put all images you want on it and mount NAS drives at boot.
I’m leery about using a USB for long term persistent OS storage due to lifespan issues I’ve seen when just running a hypervisor from one. A ‘real’ usermode OS is probably going to have a worse lifespan than what I was seeing at work.
I have a raspberry pi running from a microsd (which uses the same kind of tech as a usb stick) for over 5 years with dietpi.
But considering that you think you chewed through an nvme somehow, you may be right.