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[GUIDE] How to install DSM on XenServer 6.2


r27

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First of all thank you so much for your hard work. Synology is great product and I think this community will make it more popular. I just wanna share my experience with this product.

 

I have 1 Synology (409+, 4.2) and Xpenology (4.3, based on Trantor's build) .

 

409+ still works as expected. Never had an issue with this box in 3 years. But it is time for replacement and it will be DS1513+.

 

Xpenology based on LianLi PC-Q25, ASUS H87I-PLUS and 4 seagate drives. It is full functional test box for my Xenserver lab. I also tested WOL and HDD hibernation, no issues.

 

I wanted to play with v5.0 and decided to install it on Xenserver 6.2 host with pci passthrough and was surprised by performance. Latest gnoboot 10.5 didn't work (Xen paravirtual support does not boot!?), but 10.4 works perfect. I have xenserver host patched with e1000 and vm gives me around 90-100MB/sec transfer speed. If anybody will be interested in running Xpenology under XenServer then I'll post step by step guide.

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Thank you for your information.

Gnoboot 10.5 issues can be reported to gnoboot by visiting gnoboot.me, I think he will be happy to see your feedback.

Debug message from both console and Xenserver syslog may also help so please include them.

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  • 1 month later...
First of all thank you so much for your hard work. Synology is great product and I think this community will make it more popular. I just wanna share my experience with this product.

 

I have 1 Synology (409+, 4.2) and Xpenology (4.3, based on Trantor's build) .

 

409+ still works as expected. Never had an issue with this box in 3 years. But it is time for replacement and it will be DS1513+.

 

Xpenology based on LianLi PC-Q25, ASUS H87I-PLUS and 4 seagate drives. It is full functional test box for my Xenserver lab. I also tested WOL and HDD hibernation, no issues.

 

I wanted to play with v5.0 and decided to install it on Xenserver 6.2 host with pci passthrough and was surprised by performance. Latest gnoboot 10.5 didn't work (Xen paravirtual support does not boot!?), but 10.4 works perfect. I have xenserver host patched with e1000 and vm gives me around 90-100MB/sec transfer speed. If anybody will be interested in running Xpenology under XenServer then I'll post step by step guide.

 

Hi there,

did you succesfully installed DSM 5.0 build 4495 ?

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  • 1 month later...

Hi everyone,

After struggling a lot with Xenserver 6.2 and DSM (im not much of a linux user and i couldnt follow the command line instruccions in the post)

I manage to make it work!!

I was determined to test the HA feature in the DSM, and for that i needed 2 VMs with DSM, 1 in each XenServer in my lab enviroment. (2 Xenservers 6.2 with High Avaiavility). What i really like from Xenserver over ESXi is that for this HA feature in an ESXi enviroment i needed and extra VM o PC for the vCenter, and for XenCenter theres no need. But to the HA to be full, i wanted a HA storage too, without the need of extra phisical hardware, so i desperated wanted to DSM to work in a XenServer.

 

Said that, here is what i did (maybe is not the better way but it worked):

  • 1. Download gnoboot_105_xpenology_5.0-4458_bootloader_X64_by_Poechi.iso from the
http://xpenology.nl site
2. Download the DSM 5.0-4458 .pat file from Synology
3. Create a VM in XenServer, with a 100GB Disk, 512 Mb RAM, 1 vCore. DO NOT start the VM yet!
4. Mount the ISO Image in the VM's CDRom and configure CDRom as the first boot device
5. Start the VM
6. Choose the first option (not the option to install/upgrade) and everything should be looking good
7. Use Synology Assisstant to search for the new VM DSM
8. After finding the new VM DSM, right click and connect (it would open a browser to the IP of the DSM) or just use the Assitant's native Installation
9. In the installation menu DSM should see a vDisk connected (usually in that step appears that no disk was connected)
10. Follow the wizard to install the DSM, and everything should work like a charm
11. Reboot and let the boot process of Gnoboot to start with the first option
12. Continue DSM configuration
 
The only thing that might not be perfect is that in the VM should be always mounted the ISO image in the CDRom, but honestly, at that point for me it didnt matter.

 

I hope this would help someone.

Regards.

Cae

 

PS=Excuse my english

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Hi everyone,

After struggling a lot with Xenserver 6.2 and DSM (im not much of a linux user and i couldnt follow the command line instruccions in the post)

I manage to make it work!!

I was determined to test the HA feature in the DSM, and for that i needed 2 VMs with DSM, 1 in each XenServer in my lab enviroment. (2 Xenservers 6.2 with High Avaiavility). What i really like from Xenserver over ESXi is that for this HA feature in an ESXi enviroment i needed and extra VM o PC for the vCenter, and for XenCenter theres no need. But to the HA to be full, i wanted a HA storage too, without the need of extra phisical hardware, so i desperated wanted to DSM to work in a XenServer.

 

Said that, here is what i did (maybe is not the better way but it worked):

  • 1. Download gnoboot_105_xpenology_5.0-4458_bootloader_X64_by_Poechi.iso from the
http://xpenology.nl site
2. Download the DSM 5.0-4458 .pat file from Synology
3. Create a VM in XenServer, with a 100GB Disk, 512 Mb RAM, 1 vCore. DO NOT start the VM yet!
4. Mount the ISO Image in the VM's CDRom and configure CDRom as the first boot device
5. Start the VM
6. Choose the first option (not the option to install/upgrade) and everything should be looking good
7. Use Synology Assisstant to search for the new VM DSM
8. After finding the new VM DSM, right click and connect (it would open a browser to the IP of the DSM) or just use the Assitant's native Installation
9. In the installation menu DSM should see a vDisk connected (usually in that step appears that no disk was connected)
10. Follow the wizard to install the DSM, and everything should work like a charm
11. Reboot and let the boot process of Gnoboot to start with the first option
12. Continue DSM configuration
 
The only thing that might not be perfect is that in the VM should be always mounted the ISO image in the CDRom, but honestly, at that point for me it didnt matter.

 

I hope this would help someone.

Regards.

Cae

 

PS=Excuse my english

 

Hi cae,

Thanks for this GREAT guide. I edited it a bit and made it a bit more user friendly.

Cheers mate!

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

Hy,

 

i would like try a new configuration and a new product, S.A.R.A.H.

 

for that, I would like make 2 VM under Xenserver, first to use xpenology with 6HDD of 3To and the second to install Windows 7 or 8 to use S.A.R.A.H. who are only compatible with Windows...

 

You think it's possible ?

I can install xenserver on a USB Stick like ESX with Rufus ?

 

Rgds

Akhlan

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  • 4 months later...

Hardware:

HP N54L microserver

(4) 3tb sata drives(in machine)

(1) USB drive(xenserver is installed to this)

 

Virtulization/Hypervisor:

Xenserver 6.5

 

Software:

Xpenoboot 5.1-5022.2

Xpenology 5.1 – 5022

Modded Bios

Modded - qemu-dm-wrapper – got a new one from John McGuigan for xenserver 6.5 (allows the nic card to show as an e1000 nic so xpenoboot will pick it up) -

 

viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3718&p=22250

 

 

 

I don’t know why I aways decide to go a little against the grain… Might be that I already had another Xenserver up and running already…. I perfer Xenserver just because it is a very mature hypervisor, and a person can do what they want with it and not be forced into buying additional functions. Looking around I didn’t see much on Xenserver working with Xpenology. I see a lot of how to’s with ESXI, Hyper-V, etc….

 

However I was able to Xpenology to work OK, unfortunately I ran into some additional unforeseen issues. I was attempting to do PCI pass-through for SATA so that Xpenology would see the separate disks to create a larger raid. I found out that while the Turion II n54l processor does support virtualization it does not support IOMMU which I am reading is needed for PCI pass-through to work inside of xenserver. If my processor supported IOMMU I think I would be home free and this would be a null issue, but I know there a a bunch of N54L, N40L, and N36L's out there which this could be useful to....

 

I was working through a few work arounds and found two options that seemed like they might work, but ran into a few roadblocks.

 

 

The first one is to basically fool xenserver into seeing the sata disks(sdb,sdc,sdd,sde) as removable disks. This one seems like the most viable option, but I could use some help……

 

http://techblog.conglomer.net/sata-dire ... xenserver/

 

I made the edits, and they showed up perfectly as SCSI disks as was intended. I was able to attach 2 of the sata disks inside of the xencenter gui perfectly, and they showed as two seperate usable disks inside of synology. The roadblock I ran into was that because I can't install xentools I was only able to attach 2 disks per GUI default.

 

I thought to myself no problem.... I will just manually attach via a VDB through command line. Well.... that didn't work so hot and I get this message "Error: Empty VBDs can only be made for type=CD". I hunted around a bit and found what I think is the xencode here which shows the message where I am getting with what I think is the parameters. I'm not 100% sure why they are showing up “empty”. This happens even if I attach them, add something inside of synology to them(so they aren't "empty"), detach, then try to reattach through CLI.

 

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/s ... clnk&gl=us

 

 

The second way which I haven't tried since it seems like a huge mess/pain from what I am reading is "raw device mapping". I stumbled upon it when someone was talking about it for ESXI as a way to attach disks, so I did a little digging if I could do it in xenserver. Didn't find much, but what I found seemed pretty ugly:

 

https://forums.plex.tv/index.php/topic/ ... pms/page-2

 

 

So at this point I guess I have two options. Keep trying to chase down figuring out how to force additional disks through CLI inside of xenserver. Or scrap the whole idea of running this through xenserver and just install it bare metal.

 

 

I put a LOT of work/research into getting this to where I am right now, I thought maybe you might be of some assistance? Technically I am there, however I just can only add so many disks. I am like so close..... I just need a little help getting unstuck to add some more!…… I’m hoping someone might be able to offer some assistance to get this little box up and running right!

 

Thanks

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  • 1 year later...

Hi there,

 

anything new on that?

 

I bought a Dell T20 equipped with an Intel Pentium G3220 and planned to use ESXi to virtualize two Sophos UTMs, one Windows Server and one NAS. As Freenas is to hungry for RAM and I am very satisfied with my little DS215j I planned to use XPEnology for that.

 

The thing is, that even ESXi seems unable to save some power. As what I found out XEN looks much more energy efficient in idle stat, and that is what this machine will do most of the time - nearly nothing.

 

So I wondered if XPEnology will work on XEN and found this thread but the support of only two harddrives is a clear no go for my scenario.

 

Is the problem solved in the time since the last post here or do I have to use the hungry ESXi for my installation?

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