1 yr. ago • 100%

Migrating from ARM to X86

Hello All,

I currently have a home server on a raspberry pi 4 with all my services running as docker containers. All containers have their own directories containing the config and database files. This makes it easy to backup and export then.

However, in the future I have plans to migrate to a more powerful server. This means I will probably not be using a CPU with an ARM architecture. So effectively, I will also have to use the corresponding docker images. So will this new x86 docker image work with my backup docker config volumes?

13 comments

These are containers not VMs. Just rebuild them. Rerun docker compose or docker run on the new machine

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- Neither docker compose (unless docker compose build and you have source files) nor docker run will rebuild anything. OP has to check if he is using multi arch images and if not, has to change them. As for actual data in containers it varies app to app - I believe arm and x86 have different byte order, so for apps that are not storing data in platform agnostic format that might be a problem.
  
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  Interesting bit about the byte order. Question though, I have a disk formatted with ext4. Now, both on an arm device and a x86 device, the files on this disk are perfectly accessible. So why would this not apply to docker config data?
  
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- Yes, I know that. I am just curious if the files containing the data of previous images will work with the new images as well?
  
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  It should, in theory, only the binaries should be different so all config/media should work.
  
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  You'll have to make sure the volumes are mapped to appropriate directories. Such that if on your pi setup its /somedir/app1/blah, that you change it to /newdir/app1/blah.
  
  It's even easier if you re-create the same directory heirarchy on the new server, and you can rsync your folders over. I found it easier to re-create the containers first, and all my volume mounts are bind type: ie use an existing folder, rather than letting docker create the volume wherever it wants.
  
  I did exactly this kind of migration not that long ago, and for the same reason, and from the same source/destination platforms.
  
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The CPU architecture does not affect the files of your applications. Just copy the content of the volumes to your new system.

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Hi, I just went through this. Slight difference (I'm running k3s and use NFS on my NAS for configs and persistent data).

It was super smooth. Almost every container in running has an identical x86 build.

I spun up a new k3s cluster on the x86 servers and redeployed the images. Going from arm to x86 wasn't a problem except for one mariadb image that I was using that only had an arm build.

I didn't didn't build any of my own images, but if that's what you're doing, rebuild should work in most cases.

Tl;Dr, If you copy all the data folders and run the same image it should work no issue.

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- Thank you for the confirmation buddy
  
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