Hi all, I was wondering, there are several ways to separate the machine where storage for home directories are provided from the place where it is needed. This is needed in case you have multiple (virtual) desktop machines, where a number of people could log in. Most obvious techniques are nfs and smb, and perhaps if you can enforce that no one is ever logged in twice, one might use raw block devices. Point that kept me awake, is the scalability: it might very well work for ten or hundred users, but what when confronted with 1000, 10.000 or more users? At the desktop-side, i presume you have to limit the amount of simultaneously logged in users to 100-200 (depending on the amount of mem in a server). And with pam, you can mount the user dir when needed. But how about the storage side? At one end of the spectrum you can have a single NFS/SMB server exporting the whole /home. While at the other end you could export each user's home directory individually. Clearly, from the point of view of load and availablity single exporting servers should be ruled out. But how many exports is feasable? And how many nfs/smb-services can you have on a single server? afaicr, KVM or XEN create far too much overhead for separation, but perhaps nfs/smb server(s) can be placed into LXC-containers?? On purpose i leave out a number of elementary items, like the storage itself, network itself and geographically redundancy. Any admin around here confronted with likewise questions? If there are any rules-of-thumbs, i'd like to know, as it kept me awake all night ;-) My team and i are not responsible for building such environment, just for demo's and proof-of-concepts, but these have to be realistic and scalable. Hans -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org