ESXi Performance feedback

[breizhnology]

hi,

I want to share my experience with you here.

I initially installed my xpenology on ESXi with .vmdk virtual disks.
it worked but I found the system a bit dusty when it's on a very recent HP Proliant MicroServer Gen10.

Then I had to re-install this one, on this occasion, I ran the disks in RDM and not in virtual. (direct presentation of the physical disks to the virtual machine)

the first advantage is that Synology is now in charge of RAID (there are no RAID monitoring tools on this server under ESXi so it's scary) and now Synology is 'not complaining' because there's no data protection on the volume :-)

the second advantage is that in terms of performance, it's day and night. There's no comparison with before, everything opens faster, only happiness.

and sincerely, the configuration to do for RDM disks is really simple once it is well understood.

Have a nice day.

[johnqhu]

It's interesting. I'm also considering do the same thing.

 

I have two synology NASes. DS718+ and DS1618+. Both are good ones. But I still found it's slow when I streaming 4k vidoes. The transcoding seems quite CPU consuming. Then I remember I brother mentioned to me about xpenology several years ago. At that time, I don't have any interests because all I  need for synology is just storage. But now, video streaming is what I want.

 

So yesterday, I downloaded Jun's loader and setup a 3617 in my Esxi server. My esxi use Xeon E5-2690 v2 CPU and 128G RAM.  I currently config the virtual syno as:

8 core, 8G RAM, 200G Hard Disk(on SSD). I mounted my video files from my 1618+ to the virtual 3617. The transcoding is much faster for 4K video with plex.

 

Now I'm thinking about to get 4 to 5 4T HDDs to my esxi server and RDM to the 3617 and implement a raid 5 system. But I'm not quite sure how good the disk performance will be. My understanding is that it is just software raid and consume CPU a lot. Could you do some measrement?

 

 

[flyride]

There really isn't much CPU work for running the software RAID.  These links may give you some confidence.  I'm using a mix of RDM and controller passthrough.

 

https://xpenology.com/forum/topic/12391-nvme-optimization-baremetal-to-esxi-report/?tab=comments#comment-88690

 

https://xpenology.com/forum/topic/13368-benchmarking-your-synology/?do=findComment&comment=137430