Where Did Russell Go

Late to the container party

Ive been in virtualisation for 10 years, but only just started with containerisation in the last 12 months. Its crazy that i didn’t jump on the band wagon earlier to be honest, but boy am i glad i jumped in now.

Containerisation is AWESOME.

Period.

Especially when you have limited resources to run a large amount of services. I am still utilising virtualisation obviously with my VMware Cluster but I’m on a journey to migrate everything that had a dedicated Ubuntu VM on my Cluster and move it to one of my Docker hosts.

Base OS and Control

As i’m new with Docker, I utilise Docker directly on an Ubuntu VM and haven’t delved into SWARM or HA directly in Docker. I utilise my Vmware Cluster to provide HA currently and I have 3 VM’s setup that are evenly distributed across the cluster and i utilise Portainer as a management plane.

This works super well for me, mainly because i’m learning and make HEAPS of mistakes when configuring my docker containers. Having the ability to utilise VMware and Veeam to either take snapshots and roll back or restore from backup if i really break something is a necessity for me.

What am i running?

In short, a few, but not enough. The table below shows everything I’m currently running.

Docker VM 1	Description
Immich	Self Hosted alternative to Google Photos or iCloud.
NGINX Proxy Manager	Reverse proxy and cert manager for Lets Encrypt
Ubiquity Unify	Controller for my Unify AP’s and POE Switch
Cloud Flare Tunnel	How I expose some services to the internet
Heimdall	Dashboard/homepage for all services within my home network
Word Press	Self Hosted Website for wheredidrussellgo.com
Docker VM 2
Tesla Mate	Application to pull info from the Tesla API
Grafana	Website to create customer pages to show everything about the Tesla that is logged by the Tesla API
Serge	Selfhosted AI chatBot that can run up to a 14b LLM
Actual Budget	Absolutely incredible budget application that has been opensoced by the developer. Would recommend!
Docker VM 3
AARSTACK	For linux ISO’s

To run all these services its a total of 29 Containers to run the services that are required to run the services i have at home

I still have the following service running on dedicated VM’s and some of them im thinking i will keep on dedicated VM’s for VMware reasons.

• Pihole 1
• Pihole 2
• Plex
• CheckMK

What else am i looking to containerising

I’m still looking to implement these Docker containers as well as they seem to be super awesome! My issue is TIME. There is never enough time to sit and homelab!

Item	Description
Hey Willow	Open source Alexa/Goolge assistant for home assistant
Frigate NVR	Open Source NVR that can do AI recognition of objects. Works best with Coral AI chip which can be put in the M.2 Wifi Slot of one of my VM’s
Blue Iris	Paid for NVR that is $50. Apparently its great but will try frigate first
Secure AI	ChatGPT style AI LLM that you can upload your own shit into that you can ask stuff of.
Wazzah	Opensource Security Monitoring tool with direct agent for OS’s. Also a SEIM too.

I will probably do individual write ups on each of these containers overtime as i build them out and my journey into Self Hosting and containerisation continues into the future.

Thanks for reading!