Ns8 storage management

Hi,

I’m slowly planning to create a proxmox setup to host various ns8 virtual machines.

I’d like to separate fast and slow storage, and being able to define which modules run and / or store files on specific storage. Reading discussions here about storage makes me believe that there is no official, systemic and supported way to do this, am I right ?

Still, having db-driven apps running on fast nvme storage but serving bigger files stored on slower drives makes sense, isn’t it ? First obvious candidates are Nextcloud and mail.

is there something wrong in the way I consider the problem ? Maybe there is something obvious I’m missing ?

It’s possible to install apps on another disk, see also Disk usage — NS8 documentation

It’s possible to use a mounted disk as a podman volume, see also NS8 Add storage path setting like in minio to other apps - #10 by davidep

For example Nextcloud uses the volume nextcloud-app-data which includes the app and the files.

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Sure. But my question is more app vs data. I read those ressources but they both are about moving the entire app, not the data only.

A nextcloud (especially its DB) must run on a fast disk to be reactive, but the files themselves can reside on a slow, low cost storage.

Same for email (indexes for searches, …)

See my point ? one of my nextcloud is holding 4To of data, the price of that storage on NVMe would be astronomic.

That said, I just saw that nextcloud-app-data doesn’t hold the DB, that could be a good compromise.

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Exactly, it holds the data for /var/www/html (Nextcloud app, files, apps etc.).
All other containers and data(bases) are still located in the apps home folder.

As Matthieu may already know, a feature request to satisfy these requirements has already been discussed. In the second quarter of 2025, during milestone 8.5, we’ll try to implement a new core behavior that sysadmins can leverage to decide where specific volumes of specific app instances are located.

As Markus noted, for now we have only an instance-level decision for the home base directory, documented in the manual.

Didn’t know ! Can’t wait :blush:

Where can we find the roadmap for future developments ?

The Project Board link is in the dev’s manual, and a post in Announcements about 8.4 is coming up in the next days with a summary of past and future works.

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