I have been running XPEnology for many months in bare-metal configuration. I started experimenting with enterprise NVMe drives a few weeks ago to address Docker/system IOPs limits, and despite some success getting DSM utilities to recognize them, it's apparent that the core udev functionality that Synology uses for hotplug support will prevent any reliable hacking of NVMe volumes into the system. Hopefully better NVMe drive support will come soon from Synology themselves.
In the meantime, I have drives with 1.5GBps write rates, and 1024 command queue, so I had better find a way to use them. The only practical way I can think of while staying on XPEnology is to use a hypervisor to present them as virtual storage to DSM. So far I have the following working well:
NVMe drives, presented as a VMWare SSD (albeit with about a 30% performance penalty vs. native access, tested with hdparm)
Passthrough of my SATA controller (with spinning disks attached)
Passthrough of Mellanox 10GBe network
Passthrough of USB 3.0 controller (to enable USB printer and UPS support)
However, there are two devices that are visible that I think should not be:
ESXi is installed on a USB stick. Once the USB controller was passthrough, the stick and its partitions became visible in DSM. VID/PID in grub.cfg won't hide it because it isn't a synoboot device. How can I hide it?(As an aside, I thought that ESXi might lose its partitions after launching the VM with USB passthrough, but it seems to work - because of boot device?).
I cannot find any way to hide the loader vmdk synoboot drive. Is there a conclusive method of doing this? I see lots of posts and have tried many suggestions, but nothing seems to work.
Thanks for your help.