berwhale

J1900 has more cores, but the J1800 cores are clocked higher. I don't think you'll notice much difference unless you do something like transcode, in which case you should be buying a much faster CPU anyway.

I've run XPenology on a J1800 board just fine. I think compatibility for this board will depend on the SATA controller chips they've used.

Potentially a bargain. However they seem a little confused... CPU listed as either... M42S-6:HCM18NVR3:Onboard Intel Bay Trail–M J1800 Quad core Soc processors (2M buffer,2GHZ-2.42 GHz) Or... M42S-7:HCM19NVR3:Onboard Intel Bay Trail–M J1900 dual core Soc processors (1M buffer, 2.41GHZ-2.58 GHz) When in fact it's the J1800 that is the dual core and the J1900 that is the quad. And then they get more confused... Socket Type:Onboard CPU Intel Intel Celeron C1037U And then there's the LAN. The picture says 2* Intel LAN when the spec says 2*RTL 8111EL 1000 BaseT LAN. It will be interesting to see what you actually get!

No, I don't. I ran hdparm -I /dev/sdX on my system and it returned 512 bytes for logical and 4096 bytes for physical for all of the drives attached to my system. I also found this interesting IBM article that goes into some depth on how 4K sectors are handled in Linux and the performance implications of misaligned partitions. The second half of the article mentions the libparted library (used by parted) and explains how to check partition alignment... https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/libr ... tor-disks/

FWIW - I have a 4 port 88SE9215 based card passed through using DirectIO and it's working just fine. I didn't have to change any BIOS settings on the host or the VM, DSM recognized the disks straight away.

Synology list only one 4K native drive with compatibility with the DS3615xs... https://www.synology.com/en-global/comp ... mode=false All the HGST Deskstar NAS drives are listed as non-native 4K... https://www.synology.com/en-global/comp ... mode=false

If you just want to serve files and run lightweight apps, then a motherboard with an Intel J1800/1900 onboard is cheap and power efficient. The trick is finding one with enough SATA ports on the motherboard. If you want to transcode, then you'll need something with more grunt. Preferably an i5 or the quad core Xeon in the Dell T20 server in my signature. At the moment, you can buy the T20 with a dual core Pentium G3220 for £93 in the UK after rebate... http://www.ebuyer.com/738065-dell-power ... ApCx8P8HAQ The G3220 is not particularly fast - it's about 20% faster than your E7300, but uses 20% less power. The T20's with Xeon's have been as low as £200, but they tend to go pretty quick - not surprising as the CPU is worth nearly £200 on it's own.

I think someone would need to compile the Integration Services source code for DSM. I can't find any links for this on Google, I think you may be out of luck. There's a lot more people running Xpenology under VMware vSphere so there are more guides and help available if you go down this route. If you come from a Microsoft background, as I do, it can be quite steep learning curve, but it's worth it in the end

It's worth checking if you can get a rebate on a Dell T20 server with a Xeon CPU in your country - The server has been available in the UK for the equivalent of €260 with a 3.2Ghz Quad core Xeon and 4GB of RAM. The server in my sig. transcodes high bit rate 1080p movies down to 720p 4Mbps at around 12x realtime and remuxes 720p TV to the same quality at 30x.

No issue moving the drives assuming that you buy the version of the server that takes two LFF (3.5") drives. I moved 4 3TB drives in an SHR array from a physical server to a virtualized one (Xpenology running on vSphere 6.0) without issue. All data, users, permissions, apps, etc remained intact. Just make sure that you use the same version of DSM and Xpenology on both servers.

Have you given full read/write access to the Plex user account?

I run a 4 port card with a Marvell 88SE9215 chipset in my box... http://eud.dx.com/product/iocrest-marve ... -844282997 It's passed through from the vSphere host the a DSM guest using Direct IO. DSM sees all the attached drives as native (get full SMART info, etc.)

When you buy a Synology device, you're buying hardware, software and warranty support. The hardware appears overpriced because you can get the software and 'support' from here for free. Essentially, you're assigning 0 values to software and support in the cost = hardware + software + support equation.

You don't need a migration tool because the machine state is stored on the drive array, only the bootloader has been virtualized in my case. The XPEnology image on a USB thumb drive has been turned into a VM and the physical disks have been presented to this VM. Once you pass-through a device on a host, you lose the ability to hot-plug any other devices on that host (e.g. USB drives). Therefore vSphere cannot present drives connected to the on-board USB to the DSM VM. What it can do is pass-through another device (PCI-e USB adapter) and let the guest VM manage all the devices attached to it. The next thing I have to work out is how to get my APC UPS working with both vSphere and DSM. Ideally, I'd want the host to shut down the guests cleanly before the battery runs out.

If you place any value on the data that you want to store on the box, you should keep the build as simple as possible.

Upgraded a test VM, I can't see any issues.

The option to mount via NFS should be under 'Mount Remote Folder'. There are no options for NFS under the Connection Setup menu In anycase, I've realized that the local datastores are not shared via NFS. I can only access them remotely via the vSphere GUI or via WinSCP. So, I think I would need to setup an SCP connection for this.

Hmmm, I don't get the option to mount a remote folder via NFS in File Station despite the instructions here: https://www.synology.com/en-global/know ... motevolume Is this a DSM 6.0 feature?

In a word, 'yes'. Transcoding a high bit rate 1080p MKV down to 4Mbps 720p for my phone would run at 1.1x realtime on the old Celeron. The same transcode ran at over 12x realtime on the Xeon. Considering that the Xeon is worth nearly £200 on it's own, the T20 is a bit of a bargain. I have two vSphere datastores, one on the 250GB SSD and the other on the 750GB WD Black HDD. I host my 'production' VMs on the SSD and clone backups and run test VMs on the HDD. I suppose I could mount the datastores from DSM and back them up to my data volume (I think I'll try that later). I looked at various 3rd party backup solutions for vSphere, but the free versions are all limited in some way (only two backups, not compatible with DSM, etc). I've started using VMware's free vCentre Converter to manually backup VMs as clones (btw, make sure you Google how to disable SSL if you use this tool - it speeds things up a lot!).

It's not very big, it's an mATX size case and, before I put this disks in, it made less noise than my watercooled i5 with Noctua fans (I've been watercooling PCs for 15 years, mainly to make them quieter, but I did run a 2.4GHz P4 @ 4GHz for a while) However, I hear what you say about the living room. I use Nvidia Shield TVs as 4K sources for both my home theatre setups and keep the spinning rust in the data centre (AKA the garage) at the end of my garden

You can buy a Dell T20 with a 3.2GHz Xeon like mine for £221 after cashback from here: http://www.ebuyer.com/714837-dell-power ... r-t20-3708 The T20 has space for 4x 3.5", 2x 2.5" drives and possibly another 3.5" or 2x 2.5" (there's a bracket for a floppy drive which is a little space constrained). The build in my signature cost just under £400 excluding the quad nic (which I was given) and the 4x 3TB drives (which I already had).

I finally got around to virtualizing my old Xpenology server. I thought I would share my experience; basically, it just works I have the following setup: Physical: Motherboard: MSI C847MS-E33, 4GB RAM, 4x 3TB HD - Running Plex, SABNZBD+, SickRage, CouchPotato, etc. I've been running Xpenology on here for several years. Virtual: Dell PowerEdge T20 - 3.2GHz Xeon, 24GB RAM, Quad Intel NIC, Marvel PCI-e 4 port SATA3, EVO 250GB SSD + WD Black 750GB HDD as data stores - Running ESXi 6.0 Update 2 installed on SSD. Here's what I did: 1. Backed up all my data to a couple of 4TB USB drives. 2. Setup a new Xpenology VM running the latest version (DSM 5.2-5967). I allocated 4 vCPUs and 4GB of RAM, I also passed the Marvell SATA adapter through to the VM using DirectIO and tested it by creating an SHR volume on a couple of spare 1TB drives and then moving some test files there. 3. Made sure that the physical box was also on the same DSM version. 4. Removed the four 3TB drives from the physical box and installed them in the Dell T20 (after removing the test 1TB drives). The drives are connected to the Marvell SATA controller. 5. Booted the T20 and started the VM (it was actually set to autostart). Result: The VM has taken on the 'personality' of the old physical server including the hostname. All data and configuration appears to be intact (users, shares, etc.). All applications are running perfectly, Plex is quite a bit quicker! Next steps: I already have several other Xpenology VMs setup. My plan is to keep the data and file services on the one above, but migrate download duties and Plex to separate VMs. I also have a separate VM for testing Xpenology and DSM updates. Update: Moved 2 port PCI-e USB adapter (Renesys chipset) from the old server to the new one. I had to pass-through the SATA adapter again as well as the USB and then DSM found them both. I then confirmed that both backup drives are working and run another couple of back-ups to test them. Once you enable a device in pass-through mode, you can hot plug any other devices on the host (like USB drives) - this is why I had to pass through both adapters, rather than just the USB drives on their own.

There's a third option to present HDDs to a VM - you can use DirectPath I/O to pass-through the whole SATA adapter to the VM. The VM will then have complete control over the adapter and any disks attached to it. However, you do need a CPU and motherboard that support DirectPath I/O. I'm currently getting ready to move the 4x 3TB drives from my old server to the T20 in my signature using this method.

Hi Good Point, Since I still want to have (SHR)RAID in synology I opted for a smaller size VMDK so I won't loose too much space because of the parity drive. AFAIK, DSM has no awareness of which drives vmdks physically reside on. So, with multiple vmdks per physical drive, I think you're at risk of SHR reporting that it's resilient, when in fact it isn't (because data and parity reside in separate vmdks on the same physical drive) I think that, in this scenario, you need to mirror physical drive topology in the logical topology and have a single vmdk per physical drive.

Go to Control Panel, Update & Restore, then into Update Settings, select 'Newest DSM and all Updates', go back, let DSM check for latest version then download and update to 'Update 5', once the server has rebooted, set update settings back to 'Important Updates Only'