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Comment by denysvitali | Hacker News Reader

Are you sure Nomad orchestrates VMs? Do you have any relevant links? I thought it was mostly used for Docker containers, but of course you can run QEMU in a Docker container à la kubevirt

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Nomad is not a "container orchestrator" but a "task orchestrator", whereas containers can be one type of tasks. Others include Fork/Exec, Java, Podman, QEMU, VMs and more (since it's easily extended). Checkout the full list here: https://www.nomadproject.io/docs/drivers

My personal favorite is using the Firecracker driver for running Linux microvms.

Nomad engineer here; Nomad supports Task Driver[0] plugins enabling you to orchestrate anything you need it to. Nomad ships with a QEMU task driver[1] built in.

[0] https://www.nomadproject.io/docs/drivers

[1] https://www.nomadproject.io/docs/drivers/qemu

Uh, awesome! I think I missed this feature then. When was it introduced?

I remember using Nomad back when it was still 0.x, and I don't remember ever reading about this feature. Awesome addition btw!

I think I started using Nomad in 2018 or around there, and first tests I did was with the docker, java and qemu drivers.

hi queue29, what are the minimum production requirements for nomad ? what is the cheapest machine i could use from digitalocean for a production task ?

Check out the recommended requirements[0] documentation. In practice it depends greatly on how many client agents you want to manage (i.e. how large is your cluster). I personally run Nomad + Consul + Vault on the $6 AMD DO droplet to run a few website, and that node still has room to spare.

[0] https://www.nomadproject.io/docs/install/production/requirem...

Does Nomad have any support for SmartOS?

Hey, afaik no, but you can compile nomad to work with OmniOS so i assume you can do the same for SmartOS. Haven't tried that in quite a while, so don't quote me on that. In this fork you can find fixes that add OmniOS support for older version of nomad.

https://github.com/cneira/nomad

But if you want to implement something like zones driver for smartos forking/updating this would be your best option:

https://github.com/cneira/nomad-zones-driver https://github.com/Smithx10/nomad-driver-triton

Nomad can orchestrate any process, though it's commonly used with containers (Docker or otherwise). However using to to orchestrate VMs sounds like a poor fit.

thanks for the apt response aligning with the lingo, yes - nomad usually orchestrates containers. ( and not vms was my belief too, i thought it can replace kubernetes )

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