On 2015-04-20 4:24 PM, Adam Thompson wrote:

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...

Adam Thompson
Senior Systems Administrator
voice: 204.789.9596 x24 | email: athompson@avant.ca | web: avant.ca
_______________________________________________
Roundtable mailing list
Roundtable@muug.mb.ca
http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable

I'd stay away from Gluster for home directories... too many small files. The performance drops dramatically. I used gluster for virtual machines images, and performance was good.

My solution for syncing home directories turned into using Bittorrent Sync. Replication isn't immediate, but it's fast enough. I also decided to sync only a single directory and not the whole home dir. That way, as a user, I could specify what I wanted to sync and what I didn't. For example, one machine has a huge downloads directory. No use syncing that to my Mac laptop.

Gerald