It's been approximately a month, seriously does anyone know the difference here?
I'm having some issues with Rancher, about to re-install it from scratch and I know, for a fact, FreeNAS will pull down 1.4.1 - 1.4.2 is out.
Couldn't I just manually create a VM, use the RancherOS iso for 1.4.2 and be up to date?
I genuinely don't know what the difference is with a "VM" or "DockerVM" - besides it automatically pulling down Rancher?
I'm sure I've said repeatedly in this thread that the FreeNAS devs do not appear to kept watch on what is the latest rancheros iso (currently 1.4.2). It's only ever been updated after people raise the issue.
If it were possible to create a standard VM directly from a rancheros iso, why would the FreeNAS devs needed to have created a separate "docker VM" function? So the answer to your question about using a rancheros iso is no, it is not possible. See my post near the beginning of this thread at #11. A rancheros iso does not support UEFI, it is "syslinux" based and does not contain a grub config via which the bhyve grub-loader could load its linux kernel.
The FreeNAS implementation treats a "docker VM" like a linux embedded system combining a "kernel" , "initrd" and "root filesystem". See what you end with in the hidden dataset
<your pool name>/.bhyve_containers
Just keep watch on the the middlewared log ( e.g.
tail -f /var/log.middlewared.log
) as you create a "docker VM" and a "normal VM" and you will get some idea of what is going on in the background.
Personally, for small scale docker deployment, I don't see any obvious drawback to creating a standard linux VM in which you can install docker, docker compose and for example portainer for docker management. The base OS may not be so slim as rancheros, but IMHO would be easier to understand & manage and importantly can be updated by the user. Rancher is now recommending 1280 MB of rancheros and once you add the RancherUI, memory requirements grow nearer to 4GB. So using rancher is hardly light on resources.
Another question is how to configure access to your pool data. In Rancher the intention seems to be to use NFS only, although CIFS is possible too. You have to work out how to do this via yaml config files, creating network shares on FreeNAS which are then mounted inside rancheros. The principal is the same within a standard linux VM running docker, but you can just use the standard linux syntax to mount the network shares. As always, care must be taken to provide the correct user/group access to data and whether its rw or ro only.
If you know your way around cloud-init ( I don't) then perhaps rancheros offers other advantages. But latest ubuntu supports cloud-int and was being recommended earlier in the year by Rancher for use with their RancherUI version2 , which is designed for kubernetes use. I don't see that as the realm of the typical home user.