Synology does some things well and some things not so well. I’m going to focus on VMs(virtual machines) and CTs(containers) for the moment and maybe some general observations later.
Generally speaking Synology should not be charging for it’s virtual machine manager. ALL of the devices they offer lack in CPU performance and RAM capacity. The idea that one could create a number of VMs and get some useful work done or that you could cluster enough for some HA is kind of a joke.
At this moment I’m bulk uploading some photos and the CPU regularly goes to 100%.
Docker containers have the advantage that they use KVM and some overall sharing of resources instead of partitioning the resources as in the VM solution. It does have some limits like it’s limited to Linux OS or linux based services. But trying to get some work done is a pain in the ass. One of the basic containers (alpine/golang) was OK as a client which I could terminal connect to through the DSM console, however, it was not running ssh-server and so getting some real work done would require a better docker file.
The real problem with docker is that the underlying system uses btrfs and that creates snapshots every time there is a change to the file system. I suppose they could always change the filesystem but for right now I know what the long term side effects of change. It’s why docker likes micro services.
One other issue is that a few years ago hackers were installing hacked base images in the shared registry hacking the invetory.
As I’m getting to the end of this post and I’m considering the testing I just did with GlusterFS it seems that I could do a descent job putting together a working lab but will have to deal with the security on another level later.