I am trying to plan my home lab to satisfy two different needs:
- I want a stable environment where I will put a relatively expensive NAS and maybe some other Zima boards.
- I also want to try new versions and configurations in an env where I can break stuff BEFORE trying things on my Production environment. I would also like to use that environment to try other things like playing with Kubernetes, Docker, Iceberg, etc. I am a backend software engineer so this is very useful to me. Besides being fun.
So, I am just trying to gather ideas on how to configure this both in terms of software and hardware.
If you’re very concerned just have your prod environment and kick up test services in docker containers and test your tweaks and changes there.
Doing this ad-hoc will be easier and more practical than trying to maintain two full environments like you’re a series B startup finding it’s feet!
That will have a host of other issues that is not super fluid to work with while trying to maintain similar environments. Most notably the networking.
If this causes networking issues, your setup is already too complicated to manage through a flat set of docker containers. That’s not a bad thing, this just isn’t the horse for that course so to speak.
Not causing network issues, but for a layman that isn’t familiar with managing multiple environments already, controlling a multi-env containerized environment is going to be a nightmare if solely just using containers as a staging environment. It doesn’t map to what his prod env (non-container) would be, and it’s not going to catch problems which would arise from his prod environment anyway if looking at from an integration standpoint.
I feel like that’s a lot of assumptions based on OP’s brief, but I don’t disagree with anything you said.