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Tutorial: Install DSM 6.2 on ESXi 6.7


luchuma

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The very first post at the beginning of this thread explicitly states that you need a second SATA controller. I have found this to be true, as adding a drive to the primary SATA controller results in the system not seeing the drive at all.

 

I used the most recent 3617xs OVA supplied on Page 5, got a successful boot of the system, and it sees the drive I added to the second controller, but it fails to format.

The OVA instructions did not specify the second controller, but I find having the disk attached to the original control does not resolve the issue. See the below screenshots. 
image.png.781daa2ccd30e1cba4ac81ee8deacf7f.png

image.thumb.png.f5ea21d45e2d3faf0c4493eaaa4ff08e.png

When I add the drive to the second controller, it is detected, but it can not be formatted.

 

Some extra info: I live and breath VMWare. It's a key part of my career. Primary/Secondary controller should not matter. The issues with primary/secondary are purely related to the bootloader in use. If I manually deploy the 3615xs build, I'm able to make it work with the two controller method, but not the single controller method. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Did a bunch of searching but didn't come up with an answer. So posting here as the question is specific to Xpenology VM on ESXi...

 

How do people backup their VM? Given the risks of DSM updates, I want to create a backup/snapshot of my Xpenology VM before applying any updates. But I can't seem to find a simple way to do this. LOT'S of heavy VM backup solutions for ESXi but those are overkill or require a fully API license for ESXi. So what are the simple best practices here? I see a 'Snapshot' feature in ESXi Host but it doesn't appear to work on a running Xpen VM. I haven't tried using that feature after shutting down the VM, but hoping to find a solution that doesn't require me to take my whole NAS offline just to backup the VM.

 

/m

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It depends a little bit on your installation.

 

In my particular case, since all the NAS storage is passthrough or RDM, there really is no unique XPEnology data in datastores other than the vmx file and the RDM pointers.  So I just copy those small files up to my PC for safekeeping.

 

For VMWare itself, it's pretty typical to make a clone of the USB boot device when the system is down, as it doesn't change, unless you upgrade or patch VMWare.

 

I'm running a couple of Linux VM's and I'm using VEEAM for Linux to back those up to XPEnology.

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2 hours ago, flyride said:

It depends a little bit on your installation.

 

In my particular case, since all the NAS storage is passthrough or RDM, there really is no unique XPEnology data in datastores other than the vmx file and the RDM pointers.  So I just copy those small files up to my PC for safekeeping.

 

For VMWare itself, it's pretty typical to make a clone of the USB boot device when the system is down, as it doesn't change, unless you upgrade or patch VMWare.

 

I'm running a couple of Linux VM's and I'm using VEEAM for Linux to back those up to XPEnology.

 

I have the same setup. I have a small SSD that is my ESXi datastore but all the main spinning disks are passthrough via an LSI controller. So would it be as simply as just copying the files in my vm files as you suggest to a different system? Pardon my ignorance but I'm not an ESXi expert so how do I expose the SSD datastore as a shared file system? Or is in the inverse where I mount an external file system to ESXi and then copy the datastore files to the remote system from ESXi? Would appreciate the specifics there. Thanks.

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33 minutes ago, mrwiggles said:

 

I have the same setup. I have a small SSD that is my ESXi datastore but all the main spinning disks are passthrough via an LSI controller. So would it be as simply as just copying the files in my vm files as you suggest to a different system? Pardon my ignorance but I'm not an ESXi expert so how do I expose the SSD datastore as a shared file system? Or is in the inverse where I mount an external file system to ESXi and then copy the datastore files to the remote system from ESXi? Would appreciate the specifics there. Thanks.

 

Kind of answered my own question: looks like I can just mount a NFS share on my Synology from ESXi datastore. Would it then be as simple as copying the VM to that remote volume? I've copied VMware Workstation VMs around in the past and could easily boot those after telling VMware that it as a copy. Just wonder if ESXi vm copies could work the same way.

 

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10 hours ago, mrwiggles said:

For anyone else having my same 'vm backup' questions I found this video which summarizes a simple vm copy to a another host.

 

 

 

I m not agree!

It's suitable only for very small VM's  .Not for the production environment . (data transfer to/from esx data store using copy/paste it's very slow ).

And there it's not deduplication as well.

 

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21 hours ago, mrwiggles said:

Thanks @flyride So I’m back to my original question: I want to backup my Xpenology VM to avoid a complete reinstall in the event of hardware failure. Is there a simple way to do this given that I am using free ESXi 6.7? How does everyone do this?

 

I use ESXi 6.7 free and backup using ghettoVCB, https://github.com/lamw/ghettoVCB

 

Works great :)

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9 hours ago, foxbat said:

I m not agree!

It's suitable only for very small VM's  .Not for the production environment . (data transfer to/from esx data store using copy/paste it's very slow ).

And there it's not deduplication as well.

 

 

For my use case this approach works fine. I’m not trying to back up a lot of large VMs on a regular basis. As I said in my original post, I have just the Xpenology VM and want to copy that to a remote volume in case of hardware failure. I understand that simple copy wouldn’t be a good option for many use cases and with many VMs. But in my case I just enabled NFS on my Synology NAS and mounted that volume from within ESXi so that I could copy the Xpenology VM to the other Synology. Combined with taking a snapshot also, this gives me what I need for failure protection.

 

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Hi... I installed dsm 6.2 on VM Workstation following this ESXi explanation but importing all files.
I have not had any problems with the initial DSM installation, nor have I updated to the latest version.
I only have problems when I try to add more disks, sata or scsi. I thing is a problem related with grub.cfg and SataPortMap=1 in set sata_args line... Is it possible?
Could anyone help me about how to make changes to make possible I can add more hdd, sata for example
Thanks

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13 hours ago, pepetops said:

Hi... I installed dsm 6.2 on VM Workstation following this ESXi explanation but importing all files.
I have not had any problems with the initial DSM installation, nor have I updated to the latest version.
I only have problems when I try to add more disks, sata or scsi. I thing is a problem related with grub.cfg and SataPortMap=1 in set sata_args line... Is it possible?
Could anyone help me about how to make changes to make possible I can add more hdd, sata for example
Thanks

I answer to myself: It is not necessary to change anything in grub.cfg, only when adding disks, that are SATA and that they are in another controller different from the boot disk, that is, different from the 0:0 , 0:1 or 0:2

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