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That was my reason for switching to ESXi (or virtualization in general). Now a single computer is capable of running OS X, Windows, Synology and Ubuntu at the same time.

I assume this is only for people installing XPenology on a physical device? Anyone tried using a throttle script for ESXi or another hypervisor? Looks like XPenology is using quite a lot of CPU (unnecessarily), but I haven't had the time to take a deeper look at it yet.

Personally I wanted to get the most "native" feel of my XPenology so I got myself a SAS 9201-16i Host Bus Adapter and added that to my VM using pass-through. That way I have SMART working and it's easy to add/remove drives and even move them to another synology device if necessary. All of my VM's are stored across SSD drives and ESXi itself it booting from a small USB drive.

Seems to work fine for me too.

I upgraded from 5.2-5644.1 to 5.2-5644.5 and it seems to work as it should. All data are kept, but some settings may change. The IP address will be set to automatic again, so just make sure to change that back after upgrading if you're using a static one.

If you want something that's easy to maintain I really recommend to stick with a official Synology device. XPenology is nice, but you won't get automatic updates and will have to get your hands dirty once in a while, especially if you make your NAS accessible from the Internet. Transitioning to a Synology device that supports more hard drives shouldn't be problematic either. Regarding online backup I'm personally using CrashPlan. It's working great, it's cheap, unlimited storage and supports encryption with your own private key. I have made a tutorial on that if you want to take a look. The link is in my signature. If you only intend to sync stuff locally, rsync should do the job just fine.

Are you using a valid mac/serial pair in your boot image? I think that might be a requirement for that.

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I use StartSSL (Free) with XPenology and it works great!

I guess the most important advantage of using a hypervisor is hardware support. Being tied to certain hardware because XPenology doesn't have the correct driver sounds like a nightmare. Apart from that it really depends on preferences. Personally I love using virtualization (ESXi) because I run a couple of different virtual machines with services not suited for running on XPenology. I don't think Plex performed that well and other resource intensive applications are generally performing better in its own vm than as a package on XPenology.

It's quite a while since I've used XPenology on Hyper-V, but it should work right out of the box. Just remember to configure the network correctly so that the adaptert are connected to the internet and then go to find.synology.com to access it. Take a look at "Modify the boot image" on my blog post for more information on how to customize the boot image.

Are you using legacy network adapters and have you updated the boot image to include mac1=.... mac2=....?

This is a personal opinion, but you rather then installing XPenology directly on hardware I would recommend to install it on a hypervisor such as ESXi. I've tested Plex both on Synology and in a dedicated virtual machine and the performance was way better in the virtual machine when multiple users are streaming/transcoding at the same time. The other benefit is that you aren't that dependent on hardware and you can run other stuff in parallell , which is awesome. I would recommend spending a bit more and buy a Intel CPU, especially if you intend to use or at some time move over to virtualization. The amought of memory depends highly on your usage. 4GB should be enough for normal usage. If you intent do , you should add 1GB of memory for every 1TB you intend to sync. However, if you are convinced that you want to install XPenology directly on hardware take a look at this post: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10973

I would buy a separate controller (I use SAS 9201-16i). Don't know what you mean by "real HDD passthrough", but the closest you'll get is to passthough a pci device. If you want to use disks google "ESXi RDM".

If you use passthrough you don't need to add any drives to your VM.. just the PCI adapter. SMART should just work. If you want to virtualize the hard drives be sure to use SCSI. Adding rrmod=ata_piix as mentioned in the video will remove any IDE drives. So the boot image should be the only IDE hard drive assigned to the VM.

I wouldn't use that, but rather create your own valid serial/mac pair. I've made a video on that here:

Haven't tried to install it directly on XPenology, but if you are running virtual machines I would highly recommend to configure another VM and dedicate it to Plex/PlexWatch(App) for better performance. I've made a short post on it here: http://idmedia.no/projects/how-to-insta ... tu-server/

I've used both ESXi 5.5 and 6.0 (now on 6.0). Using SAS 9201-16i in passthrough with 10 disks at the moment and everything works fine. They are in the correct order and SMART works. Here's my guide:

Short explained: 1. Make backup 2. Download the new boot image and modify it 3. Select install upon boot and visit find.synology.com 4. Follow the wizard, but remember to do a manual upgrade (don't download DSM automatically) Step-by-step video tutorial:

I've just made a video tutorial on how to install or upgrade XPenology 5.2. Hope this helps new users to get up and running: I intend to make a couple of videos on XPenology and how to install it in different environments, packages, hacks and tweaks. If you are interested in this, please like the video or subscribe to my channel! I would also love tips on how to improve as this is my first YouTube tutorial video.

Are you sure that you have specified a valid serial/mac in your boot image? Might be unrelated, but worth a try.

I know this happens if you add a small virtual hard drive to the volume.. like when you create a virtual machine and try to add a >16GB hard drive and try to make a volume. Please post a screenshot of your HDD/SSD section and tell us how many GB every disk is.

Update = No. It's not safe to update yet. I'm making a video on how to install, upgrade and tweaking XPenology. Should be on YouTube on Sunday hopefully.

I see a couple of advantages: * You don't have to worry about drivers. All drivers used by the hypervisor should be included in the boot image (Hyper-V or ESXi) * You'll be able to run multiple virtual machines on the same server. Some (resource heavy) packages may be better installed outside of DSM such as Plex (personal opinion) * It's easier to spawn a new virtual machine and test updates before applying these to your "production" environment * Easier to get support from the community as quite a lot of us run XPenology in a virtualized environment If you want the experience to be as close as possible to a physical installation I would recommend to use ESXi and pass-through your SCSi controller to XPenology. That way you'll be able to get native SMART support. Your data should be as safe or unsafe regardless of method used. You should always have a proper backup strategy in place.

Hyper-V doesn't support pass-through of hardware, so I would highly recommend to stick with ESXi and just install Windows Server in a VM. The only alternative I know of is using RDM/VHD drives. It's possible, but SMART won't work and you'll need to rely on your hardware raid controller instead of Storage Manager. I don't have a guide yet, but just a word of advice.