[lwhalen]

Well hold on with the NFS hate everyone. I worked for a (very large, very deep-pocketed) web hosting company around 10 years ago, and they used NFS to deploy their software, configs (this was just before Puppet started getting popular), and user data. This worked VERY well. Granted, they were running on some pretty heavy iron (a couple dozen NetApp filers, all clustered 11 ways to Sunday) to make sure that the NFS facilities stayed up, but If You Know What You're Doing(tm) and err on the 'fast' and 'good' sides of the 'fast, cheap, and good - pick two' aphorism, NFS is quite useful.

[mbreese]

Exactly - you were working with a well engineered system that could handle failover. Simply installing an NFS server on an Ubuntu VM isn't going to come close to the reliability that you'd want for this job.