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Migration from bare metal to VM?


dtran

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While XPEnology has been working great in bare metal configuration for me so far (DSM 5.0-4493 U5), I'm looking to migrate to a virtual environment, with most probably ESXi, to run other VMs on the same hardware (Intel I3-4150). So do I start from scratch or can I migrate without losing data on the HDD in the bare metal config?

 

Either way I will be doing a backup before hand, but a migration path obviously would be better. :wink: BTW, I've looked for guides in this forum but most are starting from scratch.

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While XPEnology has been working great in bare metal configuration for me so far (DSM 5.0-4493 U5), I'm looking to migrate to a virtual environment, with most probably ESXi, to run other VMs on the same hardware (Intel I3-4150). So do I start from scratch or can I migrate without losing data on the HDD in the bare metal config?

 

Either way I will be doing a backup before hand, but a migration path obviously would be better. :wink: BTW, I've looked for guides in this forum but most are starting from scratch.

It is possible, but may I ask you why?

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Why? I want to run another VM for a service or software which unfortunately is not supported in XPE or Linux. And if there's a way that can be done without losing data then I wouldn't have to restore from backup.

Why not leave DSM on the hardware as is and add Virtualbox on top for your virtualization needs?

Performance of DSM directly on the hardware will be much better and Virtual machine would not care what platform its installed on - VMWare or VirtualBox.

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Thanks, XPEH. I didn't realize that Virtualbox can be installed on top of DSM. Would you have the link for this? Also, how much does DSM degrade in a VM compared to bare metal?

It depend on the hardware, but usually enough to regret the move and wanting to go back to bare metal.

With VirtualBox on top of DSM if VM performance is not up to your needs, you simply uninstall VB and look for other solutions.

Links are here in the forum, search.

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I went from a bare metal to ESXi install. If you mount your existing drives as Raw Device Mapping (RDM), the new virtual Xpenology will see them without any issues. I did find that I needed to enable disk write caching in the BIOS to get the drive write performance to be the same as the bare metal. Other than that (and the loss of SMART monitoring), I've not seen any difference in performance, though I do just use it as a media streamer, with sickbeard, couchpotato, SABnzbd and MariaDB running on it as a back end for XBMC. This is on an HP54L.

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This is the link I followed to get RDM working on my MicroServer:

 

http://blog.davidwarburton.net/2010/10/ ... -for-esxi/

 

I did have a back up of my data, and just copied the files across. The RDM volumes *should* just work in a normal Xpenology/ Synology install but I've not had to test that. In theory you can just plug in your existing drives and it will see them once mounted as RDM.

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