Think of it like, “OpenStack for cheapskates." There are plenty of ways to automate the provisioning of virtual machines, and while this isn’t the best way it certainly works great for me. I am fortunate enough to have a very heterogeneous environment at home; aside from a few appliances nearly all my virtual machines are running Ubuntu 18.04. This approach certainly won’t work for those who have a mixed environment with different versions Linux, Windows, and BSD derivatives.

I have, for a long time, been fascinated and terrified by “Virtual SAN” solutions. The idea of combining storage and compute seems on the surface very attractive. It allows us to scale out our storage and compute together or separately in relatively small and affordable units, helping avoid the sticker shock of the upfront cost of storage systems. And as somebody especially prone to capex-phobia, that really is a great solution.