klutch14u

I've tried both types of NIC's, no IP address, just like others ran into. I've tried the serial output as well but didn't lead me anywhere useful. I have an older DS3615 VM built quite some time back, pre 7.0 but runs under 7.0 now. It has the VMXNET3 adapter and works just fine (just for a matter of saying the VMXNET3 does work).

Anyone ever get this working in ESXi 7.0x? I rebuilt using hardware version 6.7 & later (14) but still no go, never gets and IP as others have experienced.

Thanks bearcat, finally got it going. He left a few other details out but got it booting reliably. Question, when you deploy the base VM it, by default, adds a disk. I assume you leave this one and it goes on the SCSI controller. I haven't added any other data disks to it yet but when I try to install vmtools it tells me I have to add a volume. It seemed like no other disk was required on my 5.2 build. I assumed these system type pieces of software were being installed on the disk on the SCSI controller? Incidentally, is bearcat for NWMSU?

Awesome, thank you! Any idea where the grub file he refers to in the steps is? I need the MAC out of it

Did I miss a step? Where is the grub file?

Thanks bearcat, I have considered others. I have some experience with the old FreeNAS (NAS4free). I stood up a newer FreeNAS, loved the interface but the performance wasn't that great and it wanted a lot of resources to even exist as a NFS share. I'll check out Openfiler as I've seen it mentioned before over the years. I thought maybe down the road I could leverage some of the Synology features. Mostly I want something that isn't extremely pieced together and delicate. I'm afraid with all the tweaking that needs done with XPE to get it working that 9 months from now I have to relearn everything to get it working again because of an issue Good to know on the version thing, really I should probably just run 5.2

I'm also on DS3615xs but am on DSM 5.2-5644, I got frustrated with the information sprawl on this site about how to get a newer version working correctly in VMware. Maybe I'll tinker with it again on a test VM. Any particular tutorial you used that was straight and to the point that you could point me to? All I was really looking for was the NFS piece

Thanks for you input, those are some impressive stats for sure. I just need a simple off host datastore so I can vmotion live. I ended up building it out, works fantastic. I used an old build of Synology though, seems it's gotten significantly more tedious to build/maintain. I didn't want to end up with something fragile and pieced together. What version do you run?

I currently have a home VMware cluster. They have shared ISCSI storage off of a Windows 2012 bare metal box so I can vmotion between them. Works fantastic. I'm looking to replace the 2012 with a new physical server. Living in the virt world for work, I tend to want to virtualize everything. Rather than waste a piece of hardware on an traditional OS or even XPEnology I considered installing ESXi on it, creating a XPE VM and share a NFS datastore off of it for my clustered hosts. This would allow me to run other things on the physical server and still give me somewhere to host a shared datastore for my other. Performance isn't a huge issue, I'm not running some sort of heavy database off it, just normal (mostly windows based) vm's. I'm kind of going into the territory of nested VM's but with storage. I'm kinda looking for someone to talk me out of it and tell me what this is a horrible idea. I just hate wasting an entire piece of hardware for 1 thing.