HP N54L + ESXi + XPEnology, is SHR possible?

[Polar]

Hi. Since the N54L does not support passthrough, I am uncertain about how to go about with SHR. My VM running XPEnology has no hardware raid controller. Is this a requirement in order to use SHR? Or is this a pure software based solution?

 

If SHR is not possible I guess the only way to play safe is to set up a HA platform with 2 servers. Any other suggestions?

 

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[XPEH]

Synology Hybrid Raid (SHR) is a software only RAID with LVM. It supports drives of different sizes and in order to do it, construct RAID from the smaller chunks the size of the lowest denominator of all the drives. You can read about SHR on the official Synology site.

[Polar]

Thx for the advice. I have been reading that section, and looked at the videos. Butmaybe I am over-complicating things... What I can not seem to figure out is if I need a raid controller or not. Due to the reason that I explained above.

 

Another thing I noticed is the status of my to added RMD drives. In ESXi 5.1 I added 2 drives to my VM by using RDM. The drives show in the XPenolgy > control panel > Info Center > Storage. Disk 4: Virtual disk, Size 16Gb, Status: Normal, Volume 1 // Disk 5: WD41EADS, Disk Size 931 Gb, Status "Not Initialized" // Disk6: WD20EARX, Disk Size 1863 Gb, Status "Not Initialized".

 

What does this mean? Are disk 5+6 ready for usage or not? I've been reading about how XPenology installes an OS on every drive. Is that a must? Or am I missing something here?

 

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[XPEH]

Your RDM "Not Initialized" Drives are ready to use just like any new unformated drives from factory. When you "Initialize" them, DSM will create a small system partition and write copy of itself to every new drive. The rest of the "Initialized" drive will be ready for creating new volumes or disk groups or expanding existent volumes.