TLDR: I am running some Docker containers on a homelab server, and the containers’ volumes are mapped to NFS shares on my NAS. Is that bad performance?

  • I have a Linux PC that acts as my homelab server, and a Synology NAS.
  • The server is fast but has 100GB SSD.
  • The NAS is slow(er) but has oodles of storage.
  • Both devices are wired to their own little gigabit switch, using priority ports.

Of course it’s slower to run off HDD drives compared to SSD, but I do not have a large SSD. The question is: (why) would it be “bad practice” to separate CPU and storage this way? Isn’t that pretty much what a data center also does?

billwashere
link
fedilink
English
21Y

Well it’s not “bad practice” per se but it ultimately depends on what you are trying to accomplish and what the underlying architecture is capable of supporting.

Not docker specific but we run enterprise level applications with VMWare esxi hosts accessing vm’s over an iSCSI network share and plan on trying this using NFS datastores over 100gbe with SCM and E1.L SSDs. So this should work fine but this is super fast super expensive hardware and is a lot different from homelab type architecture. Now I have done similar things at home with two esxi hosts using a Drobo for NFS datastores so I could vmotion. Was it super high performance? No. Did it work? Yes.

For a small container based environment I’d probably keep all the containers and storage for the containers local, probably on a fast SSD or NVME drive. Those are usually small. But any large media I’d NFS mount and keep that on the NAS. You can get 1TB NVME drive and pcie adapter for less than $100 on Amazon that would be way fast enough for anything in a home lab.

My 2¢… 😀

Create a post

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it’s not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

  • 1 user online
  • 16 users / day
  • 57 users / week
  • 177 users / month
  • 809 users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 1.6K Posts
  • 9.06K Comments
  • Modlog