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Virtualized Xpenology and SSD virtual drives


minorsecond

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I've installed Xpenology as a VMware VM with three drives: one for root, one contained in an HDD datastore, and one on an SSD datastore. My plan was to use SSD caching, but I'm not sure if I can make DS see the SSD drive as a solid state drive. Has anyone attempted this?

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1 час назад, minorsecond сказал:

I've installed Xpenology as a VMware VM with three drives: one for root, one contained in an HDD datastore, and one on an SSD datastore. My plan was to use SSD caching, but I'm not sure if I can make DS see the SSD drive as a solid state drive. Has anyone attempted this?

There is no need to allocate a separate drive as root. The DSM will be installed on each available physical or virtual drive (hdd or ssd) and will occupy approximately 5 GB on each. You can use ssd as disk or cache, but only using drives with sata interface. There were attempts to use nvme disks as a cache, you can read about it here.

But in VMWare all drives will recognize as hdd.

 

 

P.S. Perhaps it will if fully passthruout the sata controller to the VM.

Edited by Olegin
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Actually there are some combinations that work to use NVMe under ESXi as the VM emulates whatever disk interface you want.  SATA and SCSI are recognized by DSM.  I've had the best results with physical RDM and SCSI under DSM 6.1.x.  DSM 6.2.x can be made to work but it's much, much more finicky (which is true in general).

 

See this and this

 

It does also work with virtual drives on SSD datastores (see earlier in the thread).  In any case, the drive must be recognized by DSM as an SSD disk type for it specifically to be available for cache.  I'm not a fan of cache personally, but to each his own.

Edited by flyride
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Wow, thanks all! I've got some good reading to do. 

 

For now, I tried setting up an RDM disk to pass through two SSD drives directly to DSM, but the drive information still isn't being passed through. So it looks like I might have to do PCI passthrough.

 

@flyride, why aren't you a fan of cache?

Wow, thanks all! I've got some good reading to do. 

 

For now, I tried setting up an RDM disk to pass through two SSD drives directly to DSM, but the drive information still isn't being passed through. So it looks like I might have to do PCI passthrough.

 

@flyride, why aren't you a fan of cache?

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On 6/6/2019 at 9:20 PM, flyride said:

Two reasons:

 

1. Ongoing, albeit occasional instances of volume corruption directly attributable to SSD cache

2. Real world workloads not improved substantially by cache.  See commentary here that encapsulates some thoughts on the matter

 

Hm, maybe it‘s related to XPEnology only? I have several real Rackstations in customer service, each system with R/W caches for Btfrs volumes and I never encountered corruptions. And it makes a difference when it comes to heavy workloads with thousands of smaller files. Especially in CAD environments 🙂

Edited by jensmander
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No, it's not an XPEnology problem, the occasional corruption events are well chronicled on Synology forum and Reddit, etc.  Why bother if it doesn't measure well, especially when you can put my small files on a real SSD.  I'm not saying cache is useless, it's just not very beneficial for typical homebrew XPEnology installations. 

 

In a multi-user environment with a 10Gbe interface and lots of small files, that's really an excellent use case.

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