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Confused - Migration from ESXI to Bare metal


andyf

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Hi All. Hopefully somebody can explain how this works to me...

 

I had a vanilla setup as outlined on Xpenology.nl using ESXI on an HP Gen8 Microserver. USB Key to boot ESXI, ESXI data store on a 256GB SSD, and a pair of 3TB WD drives mapped through as RDM drives into the Synology install. I did the initial install before the two 3TB drives were added - And the volume on these was created after all the initial DSM install

 

For whatever reason, I couldn't make it stable. Would be fine for an unspecified amount of time, and then the load average would increases, and increase, although CPU/IO/Memory/Disk access were all really insignificant. Eventually it would freeze, and couldn't even be stopped by the ESXI manager.

 

So I decided to scrap ESXI and go bare metal.

 

I installed Xpenoboot onto a new USB key, removed the ESXI boot key and booted Xpenoboot instead. I selected the update/install option and let it run.

 

I then used the Synology assistant to find the device and went to it via the web browser, expecting it to be a initial install page that I had seen before, asking me to upload the main pat file.

 

However, I was greeted with a fully installed DSM unit, with all of the setup that I had in its previous ESXI incarnation, ready for me to log in.

 

My only conclusion was that the DSM files had somehow been moved onto the main 3TB volume, although that wasn't even installed when I originally installed under ESXI.

 

So I guess my question is:

 

Where is the DSM software actually running from?

Can I remove the SSD that was used as the ESXI datastore - I can't see how this is possibly being used as it only contained ESXI VMDK/VMX files?

 

Thanks for reading my long and confusing post!

 

Andy.

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I did something similar. I had one drive as the ESXi datastore and two drives via RDM. I replaced the ESXi USB key with one containing XPEnoboot, removed the disk with the datastore and ait all just worked. AFAIK the DSM system is copied to each data disk that you start with and to new disks as you add them. This allows DSM to run whenever one (or maybe more) disks are down.

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