Benoire

SHR-1 is simply a mix of raid 5 partitions and raid 1 partitions depending on how you split the space up. You can manually calculate a hybrid raid, create the partitions and then do lots of md superblocks to create the various raid levels... This is all hard coded in to DSM as far as I can tell and is not a script. SHR2 is simply except uses Raid 6 and probably dual mirrors at raid 1 level.

So I got it, simply used poweriso on the img file, edited the grub.cfg to add the correct command that hides the IDE drives, switched the VMDK on to the IDE controller and rebooted and it was gone.

Does anybody know how to mod the VMDK image for esxi to hide the ide boot device? I know the command, just don't know how to edit the files to change the grub lines.

esx is and I was running the last version of vmware tools spk that I could find... Is there a newer set of tools?

Hello I've got a vSAN/DRS enabled esxi 6.5 cluster with 3 hosts. Xpenology (5.2) was upgraded to VM version 12 but since moving to 6.5 from 6.0, every now and then I get the host dropping out and vcenter cannot connect to the host. This host is the Xpenology host with PCI passthrough of the HBAs. Ultimately looking through the logs the host is complaining that it doesn't recognise the linux build and crashes the host agent until the host is restarted. In general, has anyone had any issues with 6.5 and an xpenology 5.2 dsm install using the vm tools? Thanks, Chris

No, you can't upgrade DSM without drives installed as DSM is installed on the drives. You could get away with using another disk that isn't part of the array to upgrade to the newest DSM, reinstall the older array and let the new DSM replicate itself across the drives, this should do it without crashing the upgrade.

yes, I think 6.5 is on HWv11 or 12 now.

I would download 6.5 as that is the latest, it drops the C# client and has a decent HTML5 ui. No point running older versions in my opinion.

ESXi uses Hardware versions to define VM compatability to host version, e.g. HWv10 is ESXi 5.5+ as it introduces new hardware tech (sata drives for example) that when run on an earlier version of esxi will not run. They also used to tie hardware versions to the vcenter platform e.g. HWv8 was 5.0/5.5 using the C# client but the newer HWv10 introduced in ESXi 5.5 was only editable by a vcenter server.

If that is true, how does the synology FS3017 have Intel Xeon E5-2620 v3 (two of them)? so does this product not utilize all cores then? I think its the DS3615xs is limited. Each model has a DSM associated with it that has the drivers and tools for the model, the model we're using comes in a single CPU form only. If Xpenology was compiled against a dual core rackstation then I would imagine it would utilise more than 8 cores.... Now, Synology may have changed this since DSM 6 but last I checked it only reported 8 cores.

I think DSM itself is limited to 8 cores, and that will include hyperthreaded too... So my dual L5630 with 16 'cores' only uses 8 of them.

You don't need to really. You can pass virtual disks, RDM disks (real disks but still controlled to a certain extent by ESXi) and full passthrough of the controller. RDM is actually a very useful tool as it doesn't drop the controller to the VM, the main issue is that sometimes things like SMART don't work correctly. RDM and controller passthrough should generally be of a similar speed and performance, with virtual drives being so much slower. My predominant reason for using controller passthrough and not RDM is that I wanted to segregate my DSM drives from my vSphere vSAN setup.

I use Xpenology in an esxi 6.5 vm environment. I dedicate 6GB Ram and 3 vCPUs as well as passing through 2 controllers to the VM. So far, it hasn't failed and as the boot image is the only thing stored within the esxi environment, any failures to ESXi do not affect the DSM storage drives, you can also take a snapshot of the VM before passing through any controllers which makes it easy to rebuild should the vm boot image have an issue.

Predominately DSM6 brought BTRFS as a filesystem for use which 5.2 doesn't have, it improved some of the default apps such as the cloudsync allowing multiple sub-folders below root. I'm sure there where speed improvements in DSM too, but you'd have to see the DSM 6 release list to see what it offers over 5.2

Links are down until Quicknick has updated the bootloader to v2.3.

I did think that this would be the case as this stops the boot drive being written to completely. So, how would we go about hiding the boot disk from DSM as otherwise you end up with the boot drive only 11 slots available for drives without the problematic config changes that get lost on each update.

Cool will give it a go. I have about 5TB of vSAN storage available to do lots of testing!

So added some more drives, set the boot disk as non-persistent, started the install. At about 60% complete, it is erroring out with code 13 indicating the PAT file is corrupt. System is: VMware vSphere 6.5 OVF install from the downloads post 3 additional drives from my vSAN as a test (proper system is running 5.2 with my 9211-8is) This setup worked fine using Jun's loader, including setting the boot disk as non-persistent.

Ok, so never had to do this via esxi but how do I edit the grub.conf from within the booted OS? Normally, I could edit this via the USB stick when doing baremetal but using ESXi, I do not know how to access the grub file from a booted system. Can someone point me in the right direction?

Will this work if the drive is not set to IDE? If the drive is naturally set to SCSI, which it is Device 0, then ata_piix won't do anything and the drive will still show or have I got this wrong?

Hi Quicknick, For ESXi installations, is it possible to hide the boot drive? I've tried changing the disk mode to IDE as I would for the older boot images but then the VM won't boot, changing it back makes it work fine. Leaving it as a SCSI disk means that the system tries to format the boot drive on install and I presume I won't be able to hide the drive using rmmod as it would hide my SCSI drives from the SAS HBA? Basically, it boots fine but I want to hide the boot drive; are you able to change the esxi image to IDE and apply rmmod="ata_piix"? Cheers, Chris

@Quicknick - Is the configuration menu supposed to be accessible on ESXi? Everytime I select it, it just goes to the kernel boot and then indicates that I should use find.synologycom to search for it. Is this because my VM doesn't have a serial connection to it and that setting one up would allow me to see it? For reference, I'm using ESXi 6.5,

Indeed, thank you very much. Looking forward to upgrading my older DSM 5.2 install to this! Excellent work for all those that contributed and especially quicknick for creating this bootloader.

Yes, Synology removed the option for SHR creation in the DS3615xs last year. You need to edit the synoconfig file to add it back in, search this thread to find out how as its listed.

Only the rackstation variants will have the lsi cards enabled in the kernel as they are the only ones that can use SAS cards.