this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
22 points (92.3% liked)

Selfhosted

39254 readers
245 users here now

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!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I am setting up a Linux server (probably will be NixOS) where my VM disk files will be stored on top of an NTFS partition. (Yes I know NTFS sucks but it has to be this way.)

I am asking which guest filesystem will have the best performance for a very mixed workload. If I had access to the extra features of BTRFS or ZFS I would use them but I have no idea how CoW interacts with NTFS; that is why I am asking here.

Also I would like some NTFS performance tuning pointers.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

Yeah, I'd just like to ask why it has to be NTFS as well. I want to help you to the best of my ability.

Now in terms of what you are trying to accomplish, it would sincerely help to know what kind of server you are trying to create and what you want it to accomplish so I can help you with the design. It would also help to know what hypervisor you are using to read those VM disks. Now, for the sake of the rest of this post, I'm going to assume that you are simply creating a Linux server meant to share those disks with a hyper-v hypervisor (to ensure we discuss the worst case... Lol... but also because I think the only reason you need NTFS is to support a Windows hypervisor).

Now if that assumption is correct, I would still ask why the filesystem must be NTFS. If all you need is a share for the files then why does the filesystem even matter? In my opinion, the worst case scenario that you have is a samba share which shares these files over as a Windows share. Now Windows is capable of better sharing utilizing either iscsi or NFS. None of these three sharing solutions (samba, iscsi, NFS) require an NTFS filesystem. Though I will admit that there may be some other thing that causes an issue with the potential of these solutions.

Anyways, not to pry, I want to help you though but a little more detail would significantly help with helping you find a solution.