[Lxc-users] Containers in NFS, or ...

[Gordon Henderson]

A few months ago there were some posts about running containers in a 
diskless host - just looking for some more info about this in my ponderous 
ponderings!

I'm not after having a diskless host (although it's an option), but to 
have a host NFS mount a filesystem of a container, then start it....

ie. big NFS servery type thing. Many front-end hosts with lots of RAM, but 
minimal disks. Container image NFS (or ?) mounted off server. Lets assume 
2 LAN interfaces on the fronting server - a private one to the filestore 
and a public one to the rest of the world... (although that's not critical 
for what I'm thinking of)

That would then make management of the images utterly trivial and give the 
ability to migrate them from one physical host to another with nothing 
more than a shutdown/de-config on one host, and a config/startup on a new 
host...

However, assuming LXC is happy with it, there's the issue of running 
services on an NFS server - but that's really not something for here - I'm 
just interested in the scenario of server + multiple hosts... mounting 
images via NFS. I can't think why it might not work... Obviously there 
might be performance issues, but lets assume the environment is mostly 
read access of a typical LAMP type server (with the M part on another 
separate server using standard MySQL network access to it, rather than 
local access to the (NFS) disk)

This is basically a managemnt type issue more than anything else - the 
ability to migrate containers to faster/less loaded hosts, or failled 
hosts and so on. (Lets assume the file and sql servers are adequately 
backed up by other means)

Anyone see any issues? Would anyone do it differently?

Cheers,

Gordon