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HerbertJ

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  1. Overview: I am running a Dell R230 1U rackmount server. It has 4 hard disk bays. At present, I am 'wasting' the 1st disk bay as my ESXI VM datastore, but I am interested to see if I can refactor this in order to allow me to pass all 4 hard disk bays through to Xpenology. Background: On my first attempt at using Xpenology, I used Jun's loader to do the following: I installed ESXI to the internal USB stick and I boot ESXI from that USB stick My first physical hard disk is a 500GB unit. I have the full 500GB set up as my VM datastore. Within that datastore I have a folder for Xpenology (containing synoboot.img and synoboot.vmdk) and a folder for 'NAS' (containing .vmdk files for the physical disks that I am passing through to Xpenology and various vmware.log files) Synoboot.vdmk is set up as a 50MB thinly provisioned disk on SATA controller 0:0 The 'NAS' VM datastore is set up as a 50GB thinly provisioned disk on SATA controller 1:0 I then pass through physical disks 2, 3 and 4 on SATA controller 1:1, 1:2, and 1:3, respectively. My question: Is it possible to set up a, say, 128GB USB stick as my VM datastore, such that I boot ESXI from USB stick #1, store the VM datastore on USB stick #2 and then pass through all four of my physical disks to Xpenology? I believe the simple answer is probably "Yes - it is possible". My next question is "should I do this"? I am specifically concerned about USB wear over time. Initial boot of ESXI and Xpenology into memory is low impact to the USB stick, but I am worried about constant log file / scratch file writing to the USB sticks. Is it possible to set up ESXI and the Xpenology VM datastore such that there is no writing to the USB sticks?
  2. Thank you once again for your informative reply. I had thought that the write-cache in the RAID controller would make disk writes much faster that with software as I hadn't appreciated that Synology DSM would be smart enough to utilize the system RAM as write cache. I plan to pass 8GB (or more) through to the Synology VM - so that is good to know and will definitely influence my design choices. I would like to leave myself open to use the host for other virtual machines, so I think I may pursue the option of passing certain disks through to Synology but not the full controller. Are there any disadvantages to this approach over passing the full controller? Thank you also for the link you've provided. In my test bed setup, I used the "Add Raw Disk" menu option within the "Virtual Hardware" tab of the VM configuration in ESXI to pass my desk through to the Synology DSM on Virtual SATA Controller #1 (as 1:1). I did note that the SMART functionality in DSM was not working. When I SSH to the DSM and and run "smartctl --all /dev/sdc", the disk still presents as a "VMWare Virtual Disk" with "Device lacks SMART capability". It feels like perhaps I am not setting up the raw disk correctly.
  3. Thanks for your reply, flyride. The hardware based Dell H730 RAID card has a 1GB cache on it, so I was operating on the assumption that I would see higher performance using the hardware RAID over software RAID. Is this incorrect? Do you think I should just stick the RAID card into non-RAID (HBA mode) and get ESXI to pass through to Synology to run SHR? If so, am I passing the full controller through or just individual disks? I'm assuming that if I pass through the full controller then I can't use any disk which are connected to the controller as part of any other VMs? Sorry for all the questions. I have just purchased the hardware and I'm new to ESXI and Xpenology.
  4. Hi all, this is my first post on the forum. My server is a Dell R230 1U rackmount server (4 drive) running a PERC H730 RAID card connected to the 4 backplane hard drive bays. I am running ESXI 6.7 Hypervisor (booted from USB) on the server. I have completed some reading on the forum and proceeded with the installation using Jun's loader and luchuma's excellent "Install DSM 6.2 on ESXi 6.7" tutorial. Thanks to both for taking the time to produce these materials. At present, I have been testing the system with a basic single drive (non RAID), but it is my intention to use my PERC H730 RAID card to run either a 2-disk hardware RAID1 array or a 3-disk hardware RAID5 array and then pass the full volume through the Virtual Machine which is running Xpenology. I can then presumably create a single volume in Synology using to the maximum size of the hardware RAID volume? My question is: If I subsequently increase the size of the hardware RAID volume, by adding an additional disk to the PERC H730 RAID card, is it possible to resize the volume in Synology? If so, how do I go about achieving this? For example, if I start with a hardware RAID1 (2 x 14TB drives) and use ESXI to pass this through to the Synology VM as as a single 14TB disk, what happens if I subsequently add a third 14TB disk to my hardware RAID volume and convert it to a 28TB RAID5? Can I get my 14TB Synology volume to increase to 28TB without data loss? Kind regards.
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