Newbie - General 'best practice' questions

    Evening All (UK Here),


    I've recently bought a Lenovo ThinkServer Ts140 Xeon.


    I also currently have a PI running Home Assistant (Full fat home assistant with add-ons). I wanted to smash those two things together.


    I've set up OMV5 and am playing around with it, setting up and taking down Dockers for example. And tried installing a docker of home Assistant.


    The trouble is this is the stripped down version with no Add-on availability. I know these are just docker containers managed by Home assistant, but I find it easier to manage my home assistant stuff via home assistant and my server stuff via OMV.


    For that reason I want to spin up a basic barebones VM and run Home Assistant from that... But! I can't find any VM addon for OMV5?


    I've seen a video using OMV4 where they just install VirtualBox and it's all nice and easy.

    I've also seen another video by TechnoDad that runs you through Cockpit which looks like it would work, but it fails to install on mine...?

    (maybe because I've already set up portainer and docker as I understand Cockpit replaces these?)


    Also, I bought a 120gb SSD to use for my OS and Dockers (to give Home Assistant an extra speed boost) but can't work out how to do this?

    As OMV seems to want to keep itself separate - Understandable for normal use cases.

    I even tried partitioning the SSD and reinstall OMV (which obviously wipes the partitons), as well as reducing the Install partition with GParted after install, creating a new partition for the Dockers afterwards, but I'm unable to find this unused partition in OMV to use?


    Is my only other option to install OMV on a USB Key and give the whole 120gb to VMs/Dockers?

    If so how resilient is this? I've seen it's best to install the plugin to limit writes but how well does it run from OMV and wouldn't this be a major weak link?


    I currently just have a spare 500gb Sata drive for data until I get to grips with everything and then I'll be putting in two 2tb Reds.

    Quote from Coedy

    I also currently have a PI running Home Assistant (Full fat home assistant with add-ons). I wanted to smash those two things together.

    Looks like you are taking a difficult path....

    To get extra power for HA I would recommand a 2GB RPI4.

    Keeping OMV5 and HA in separate hardware make more sense to me .

    Just my 2 cent (euro of course :)) logic.


    I forgot to answer some of your questions/remarks.....

    - Portainer is better than Cockpit to manage Docker (images, containers,....)

    - Yes, HassIO with add-ons make more sense (a lot!)

    - HA is more "native" on Raspberry and Debian / OMV5 better on amd64

    - Using VM on Debian (instead of Docker) is not very efficient and probably a waste of memory

    - If you connect any USB hardware dongle to HA the Raspberry PI is easier


    - If you really want to make our own partitions on the OMV5 system device you can do that by installing Debian first and then the OMV5 on top of it


    Good luck

    Cockpit will run VM's. Cockpit is installed with OMV-Extra's, in OMV5

    If you're looking for something like Virtualbox for OMV5, here's a -> How-To. (I haven't tried this particular How-To.)
    In any case, if you have something configured that you want to keep, it's always a good idea to backup your boot drive before trying something new.


    __________________________________________________________________________________________________________


    Quote from Coedy

    Also, I bought a 120gb SSD to use for my OS and Dockers (to give Home Assistant an extra speed boost) but can't work out how to do this?

    As OMV seems to want to keep itself separate - Understandable for normal use cases.

    I even tried partitioning the SSD and reinstall OMV (which obviously wipes the partitons), as well as reducing the Install partition with GParted after install, creating a new partition for the Dockers afterwards, but I'm unable to find this unused partition in OMV to use?

    You can partition your SSD, then install Debian 10 using the net install version. You'll have choices for "where" to install Debian going this route.

    The doc for the OMV 32bit install (found here) will walk you through installing OMV, over Debian, by script. The only difference would be, you'd want to start with the 64bit version of Debian for your TS-140, in place of the 32 bit Debian Buster install referenced in the document. Other than that, the rest is the same.

    Thanks for the replies both!

    After some trial and error I've fixed most of my issues. ^^

    (Please note, these are probably not the correct fix, more like a bodge :|)


    - I realised I didn't need to run Cockpit and to just use Portainer for dockers, Cockpit has now been deleted, but I did find one very useful feature of Cockpit! (see the next point)

    - Cockpit found the missing partition I made on my SSD. I just clicked mount and it showed up instantly on OMV Admin panel, I backed up my containers, stopped them, deleted them, removed docker, pointed a fresh install of docker to a new folder on that new partition of my SSD, I just need to re-add my docker containers (now on the SSD).

    - I found an install script for HASS.io (full fat home assistant) that you run via putty that builds the supervised version of home assistant in your existing Docker. I ran that and it worked! I now have full fat Home Assistant running in Docker with each part of it visible within portainer running on my SSD.

    - I do need to work out how to pass through a USB to the docker container which will be my next hoop to jump though (I have a Conbee Zigbee Stick) but haven't looked into that yet.


    The one last thing I'm struggling with is, I used the following code to put into the OMV Shell, which I found on here (The forum):

    Code
    ### create workspace for hassio

    # mkdir /sharedfolders

    # mkdir /sharedfolders/hassio

    #apt-get install apt-transport-https  ca-certificates  curl gnupg-agent software-properties-common 

    #apt-get install apparmor-utils   apt-transport-https    avahi-daemon    ca-certificates    curl    dbus    jq     socat  software-properties-common   network-manager

    # curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/home-assistant/hassio-installer/master/hassio_install.sh | bash -s --  -d "/sharedfolders/hassio"

    ### Instalation take some time as most of packages(container) are installed after....

    However I can't find the "sharedfolders/hassio" folder to grant myself access or to add it to a SambaShare so I can easily add custom cards etc.
    Does anyone know where that would be created? Or how I could find it via OMV?

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