I'm looking for the sweet spot between:

 - NFS-mounted home directories, which allow easy central management and are portable across every workstation, but are (typically, and in my case) IOPS-limited,

and

 - local home directories, which are tied to the workstation but offer great performance

At this point I'm seriously considering things like GlusterFS, Lustre, CephFS, etc., because the NFS performance sucks so badly for doing things like a) running Chrome, and b) running VirtualBox.

Looking for ideas...