Did you separate the drives an use XPEnology just for the compatibility with other XPEnology solutions or for any performance reasons?
I have just ordered a Gen8 2020 with 16GB ram, 4 x 4TB WD Reds + SSD boot and plan on performing the same installation as you have done here (great guide btw) but using the i120 RAID controller to create a single 4x4 datastore to present to ESXi so I have additional flexibility for other VM hosts.
I saw in another post related to the N54L that a VM based install of XPEonolgy halved the data transfer rate. What's your experience so far?
Thanks