It’s still technically a Docker Swarm, but it’s a single node. I have backups, cold and hot and offsite. Nothing is mission critical, and I’ve moved stuff around from system to system many times now so it’s fairly drama free.
First migration was from TrueNAS Core to TrueNAS Scale, because I really wanted Plex to be able to do hardware transcoding and Core wasn’t having it. Scale was a travesty. Not sure why/how, but it was WAY slower than core, and the Kubernetes subsystem lasted about 20 minutes and just went into an endless loop of being broken, never to recover. VM performance was terrible somehow, and disk throughput was mediocre. Mind you, NO HARDWARE changed, it was an in-place upgrade from Core to Scale. Server was not even opened or moved, so it was not a happy experience.
Next migration after 3 days of Scale not cutting it was to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. It imported the ZFS pools and mounted them up without an issue. Setting up Docker and Plex took about 15 minutes total, then added Cockpit and the KVM support. Very simple install and it all worked, and was probably 10x faster than it was on Core. This prompted me to finish up the Docker migration so everything I had is now Docker (except Plex). Yes, I know Plex can be a container, there’s one running that just feeds a non-plexpass music-only stream for the Alexa’s, but the main one is native on Ubuntu. It’s a preference. One VM, Kali, starts up when I need it. Otherwise I have 35 docker containers running for various services. At some point I opened up the box and cleaned out all the dust, and counted RAM sticks while I was in there and found that it actually had 64GB, not 32GB, but the previous owner had put the sticks in the wrong places for a single CPU box, so now I have 64! It’s a very happy camper now, and that change came AFTER all the migration issues, so it doesn’t really contribute to the speed, but does help in how many containers it can run. With 35, it’s using about 12GB of the 64, and that’s with Seafile, Joplin, *Arr’s, Plex Media Manager, Overseer, Minio, Netbox, podgrab, traefik, and a bunch of other stuff. It’s amazing how much you can put on one box! Yes, I have backups that run every night to the cloud and two sets of cold backup drives that cycle out of my parents house.