shteve

I'm using an HP N54L with ESXi and RDM. I've got one 500GB drive in there for the host, to 3TB drives and one 4TB drive as RDM. Works a treat. http://www.vm-help.com/esx40i/SATA_RDMs.php

Go into the BIOS and look at the disc caching options. HD write cache (can't remember the exact name) needs to be enabled, which it isn't by default. You're seeing the hard drive buffers filling up, and ESXi being a server level VM manager will wait until it receives the all clear that everything has been written before sending more data. Enabling the cache will make this *much* quicker. Only downside is that if there's a power cut when writing, you'll lose data. I found this issue myself, bought new network card and the like and then stumbled upon the BIOS setting and it flew afterwards!

Are they visible in the BIOS? What version of Xpenology? Is it bare metal or virtualised?

Have a look in the BIOS for hard drive caching options. ESXi waits for the drive to confirm the data has been written before writing the next. If that is your issue, you'll see the file copy start quickly and then drop to a few MB/sec. With the cache enabled it confirms writing straight away.

They're folder names. If you log into your box via Putty you can see them, and rename them using the "mv" command. Whether the system will play nice after you do that is anybody's guess so I'd backup before trying it.

Why are we helping this guy to install an update that won't work? OP, don't go to 5.1 yet, stick with 5.0. We need an update nanoboot to get the latest version to work.

Mine wouldn't start after the upgrade due to permissions errors. Uninstalled and reinstalled and it's all good now.

Update 1 out now to fix the hard drive comptatibility issues. Applies with now probs, no need to edit the autoupd@te file either.

Leave the USB stick in the internal USB slot.

Enable the hard drive write cache in the BIOS.

Nice. The N54 is apparently 70% faster than the N36, and the Gen 8 about 70% faster than the N54. I'm able to watch 1080p shows on my LG G2 with my N54 as the server as there's no recoding required. Maybe worth a new phone rather than a new server if you need to transcode?

I just vi it and edit

It's the open source version of vmware tools. Vmware only make them for Windows IIRC, and this gives some enhanced functionality to VMs. This is the Linux one packaged for install onto an Xpenology box. You need to have installed ESXi and then Xpenology before you can use it. ESXI is the base OS, just existing to allow VMs to be installed on top.

Nope, I just virtualised my Xpenology box recently and had the link saved as a favourite. The worst part for me was that damned write cache setting in the BIOS. I ended up buying an Intel network card, different memory and a different hard disk in getting to the bottom of that (and was the reason I was trying to install the VM-tools)! Probably a good thing tbh as my initial installs were using VHDs, and I moved into RDM set ups instead which feels a lot better to me.

Either stick that command in an init script, or add it to the scheduled tasks under xpenology to run at startup.

VMware tools can be downloaded via this thread: http://www.domotique-fibaro.fr/index.ph ... gy/page-21 Yeah, I found RDM much better than a VHD file, with performance matching my other N54L which is running Xpenology bare metal. I've set the power settings to 'balanced' under ESXi, but can't really tell if the drives are hibernating. It is something I want as mine is on 24/7 too.

If it's JBOD, then the data on that disk is only on that disk. That's the way mine is configured, with each disk having one volume on it (not bothered with disk groups, although looking now I've got two, each with on disk on, and one disk not in any group!). To upgrade, I just put the new disk in the spare slot, copy files over from a smaller disk and then replace the smaller disk. Then copy the files back if you need to retain volume naming.

Where were you seeing the poor performance? If it was disk writing, enable the hard drive write cache in the BIOS.

I suspect it doesn't do anything within Xpenology. Under ESXi, write performance with the BIOS write cache disabled is virtually non-existent. With it enabled, write performance matches a bare metal install (about 80MB/sec over gigabit). Why are you trying to enable it within Xpenology?

This is the link I followed to get RDM working on my MicroServer: http://blog.davidwarburton.net/2010/10/ ... -for-esxi/ I did have a back up of my data, and just copied the files across. The RDM volumes *should* just work in a normal Xpenology/ Synology install but I've not had to test that. In theory you can just plug in your existing drives and it will see them once mounted as RDM.

Enable the hard drive write caching option in the BIOS. Took me ages to find that .

I went from a bare metal to ESXi install. If you mount your existing drives as Raw Device Mapping (RDM), the new virtual Xpenology will see them without any issues. I did find that I needed to enable disk write caching in the BIOS to get the drive write performance to be the same as the bare metal. Other than that (and the loss of SMART monitoring), I've not seen any difference in performance, though I do just use it as a media streamer, with sickbeard, couchpotato, SABnzbd and MariaDB running on it as a back end for XBMC. This is on an HP54L.

Have you added it to the xpenology VM? Either by RDM or creating a new datastore/ vmdk on it?

I went from Trantor's 4.2 to 5.0 nanoboot and all my data was intact. Had to create an "http" user group to get the web station to run, and also had to play about with file persmissions to get MariaDB (the mySQL replacement) to run. I did spend all weekend backing it all up beforehand but thankfully didn't need it. Of course YMMV.

Only thing I'd add is that for ESXi you may need to enable hard drive write caching. My Microserver ran like a dog under ESXi until I enabled that in the BIOS (was fine as a bare metal install). *edit* And now I see that you've had this tweak on your site since 14th July. Why couldn't I see it before?