GaryM

. you need 1 sata/sas port for each drive. you can use 3, 8 drive cards, e.g. M1015 or 1 controller with an expander. avoid expanders for sata drives, good with SAS drives. your power supply might be a bit small to have it running at the ideal 50% level. I have a 560 watt seasonic and I'm working it hard with 15 sata drives 2 M1015 controllers and a built in LSI SAS controller and 2 opteron cpu's with 32 GB ecc ram. will be swapping the 560 with my seasonic 750 soon. 1U power supplies are not quiet. I'm playing with my 2nd server and have xpenology 6.1.1 running on it under ESXi 6.0. My other server is ESXi 5.5 and am running 8 VM's, 2 are storage running. via omnios. I would suggest ESXi 6.0 and let the other boys play with the bleeding edge 6.5. Do your homework! xpenology is so easy to set up under VMware and hardware at times, for me, runs better under it than bare metal. With server grade hardware there is no reason not to use ESXi. Once you learn to use it you won't go back. It lets you get to most out of the hardware you have with fine controll over everything. supermicro over norco any day, homework! I am using istarusa cases and trayless drive docks. Good quality and price, if you shop. I would not go for 24 drives, to much power draw for 24/7 systems, slightly larger drives and less of them. Try to stay below 16. Sweet spot now is 3 TB drives. How much storage do you need online all the time?

fresh install of DSM 6.1.1-15101 on a VM via ESXi 6.0 and an update to DSM 6.1.1 u1 directly from the dsm interface. Source for install was jun 1.02a ds3615sx and .pat file from synology. All is working well, for now.

Question for you guys. What would be the purpose of have such a powerfull PC for XPEnology? I understand for example in the case of Freenas which is RAM hungry and ECC is very highly recommended if not mendatory, but in the case of XPEnology, why would we need more cores or a faster CPU? Why would we need more RAM? Would ECC be better or not? Most people with that hardware go the virtualisation route. So possibly utilise virtualbox or run dsm in esxi/hyper-v Most thinking people will design their system for what they need it to do, not throw the kitchen sink at it and hope that it's enough. One has to keep the operating cost of the NAS in mind as it can cost more to run than it costs to build, over it's lifetime. If one has excess hardware and can afford to run it 24/7 then ESXi or Hyper-V can help one make good use of the system if they have a need. No different than those that build fast cars so that they can get to the next gas station quicker or sit in parking lots so people can see their car, and hear them say, wow! what a car.

Just download the free "Nmap" program. I use it, works great for all kinds of network problems.

There seems to be a problem some are having and that is "what IP address did DSM take?" I use Nmap, it lists everything on your network and more. It's a lot more than you might need but then it's free. Saves a lot of time if you have a home network of "any" size. My friend google will find it for you. Enjoy.

I have no idea what docker is, so I guess I don't need it? I like having files of all sizes move at least around the 90 Mbyte/s rate, if only to save time and because they can and should. I really like being able to expand a volume or a dataset, losing that would be a deal breaker for me. I will have to ask my friend google about re-enabling SHR on a fresh install with newly cleaned disks. Good thing I didn't spend my "first born" on a new Synology box only to find good things went missing. Standard raid is no carrot on a stick for me. I would like DSM 6 to work, if only because its updated software and hopefully they didn't break something. I just tried FreeNAS Corral and I'm inclined to use DSM 5.2

I have set up a number of XPEnology NAS unit recently. I've done this with ESXi 6.0, LSI HBA in pass-through mode with one 2TB and 2 1TB HDs for testing. I've found that DSM 5.2-5967 works a treat. The file transfer through the network average: write 104 Mbytes/s and the reads 114 Mbytes/s. These are slightly better than the throughput I get with my FreeNAS and OmniOS based NAS units. The beauty of XPEnology 5.2 aside from great speed, is being able to add drives of any size to the array as more space is needed and unused older, smaller or larger drives turn up. I've been using ZFS for about 5 years now. I've done things to my disks that a raid 5 or 6 would not have tolerated, so for that data, ZFS all the way. For the less important stuff DSM 5.2 looks really good, and I like the simplicity of using it, but there is something better on the block, DSM 6! Or so we are told. I've just been playing with DSM 6.0.2-8451. Got it set up in VM just like, identical to, 5.2 as far as the VM components. This is one of the joys of using ESXi, multiple computers in one physical box and very fine control over all the parts, hardware and software. The good parts: btrfs, next best to ZFS right now? only time will tell. We can add HDs to the array, we'll see, should be able to. SHR? well it seems we are Sh** out of luck if you want to set up a fresh DSM 6* NAS. So we now have one less reason to use Ver 6's of DSM. My trials also show that the network throughput in DSM 6.0.2 is 69% of what 5.2 provides. Write at 71 Mbytes/s, reads at 74 Mbytes/s. Remember same hardware and software other than the DSM versions and btrfs vs SHR both single redundancy. The questions: If anyone wants to setup a simple noncritical data NAS, why would they use DSM 6 and up or would one use DSM 5.2 until it fails? or would one use FreeNAS, NAS4Free or OmniOS with napp-it as GUI, as these are better alternatives than DSM 6. I enjoyed playing with DSM in all it's flavours, so for NAS #3 I'll give DSM 5.2 a chance to prove it's worth, at least until I can test run FreeNAS 10, correction that's now FreeNAS Corral. If nothing else, have fun doing nothing.

Update & Restore in the Control Panel, does it quite well.

Yes I downloaded and ran the Synology Assistant for windows. It showed me my Diskstation. When I selected install, I was greeted with an error 38 and an invitation to contact Synology Tech support. A quick search of this forum showed that a code 38 is common and hardware related. I tried a virtual hard drive as recommend and then passed through a LSI 1068e HBA both of which failed. I wanted to try out the Synology system because a couple of years ago I was thinking of buying one of their NAS units, until I saw the price. I new that I could build a far better hardware system from server quality components than what they supplied for about the same price. That's what I did. I have since found that the most secure file system that I could use was ZFS, especially since I was about to try every available operating system that works with ZFS. I am able to, and have taken all of my disks of data and moved them as I pleased to any number of computers that run ZFS and did not lose anything. Try that with RAID. The only thing that I really thought would be good to try with DSM was the ability to expand the disk pool as existing HD space was used up. Can't do that with ZFS. Going to Synology's web site I see that they say this can be done, but do not recommend doing so. There goes the best feature of SHR. Now one is running RAID with all its risks, especially Raid 5. By the way, for those running ESXi VM's, RDM's work very well but compared to hot swapping hard drives, it sucks! This has been fun, it's part of the hobby. What I had finally settled on, about 6 months ago, as far as an operating system goes is OmniOS with napp-it as the NAS GUI running in a VM on an ESXi 5.1 host. It's all free and reliable, my data has value to me and is as secure as I can make it. So enjoy the computer hobby, learn and have fun and thanks for your help.

Thanks for this reply as to why I don't need a login and password. Now for the other part, Install synology assistant, where? into what? What I had done was to download everything I needed before I knew how things fit together. Since the ESXi VM is Linux etc., I must have needed the Linux version of Synology Assistant, right? That mean't I would have to login to the linux session once booted. Now that I know what does what, I have downloaded the windows version of Synology Assistant and yes it shows my Diskstation. For now, I am now on the right track, and thanks again.

I have set up an ESXi 5.1 VM. When I boot the VM the Linux session boots through to the log in prompt. One thing that the "Guide" doesn't answer is, what is the log in name and password that works? Without that what can one do? It might be nice also if the guide mentioned, how to get "Synology Assistant started, after all this is supposed to be an Idiots guide to DSM not just ESXi. This is a good guide over all but it can be even better by filling in the missing pieces so that a real Idiot can succeed. There must not be any real idiots doing this since I haven't found these questions being asked, except now. Thanks for all the work done and any answers provided.