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How recommended is Virtualize Synology NAS + IPCop in VirtualBox


bryanmaster

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Hi, I am completely new to the NAS world, I have knowledge of how to install XPenology on a VM but how recommended is it to do this?

 

I explain, I have an old PC with an E5300 processor and 4GB of RAM....

 

I plan to do:
1. Virtualize the IPCorp Firewall (extra security to the NAS server is desired).
2.Virtualize also any Synologic Machine.

All this obviously on the same machine mentioned above.

 

The idea of all this is obviously to connect the NAS server to IPCorp on a VirtualBox internal network so that it can be managed giving extra security to the server.

 

Everything will be in a productive environment.

 

As a result of all this, I had these questions:


1. How recommended is it to do the above?

2. How productive is it to take the physical hard disks of 1TB and another one of 500GB connected by SATA to my board and virtualize them so VirtualBox can recognize them and be able to work with them? Will there be a bad performance?

3. It may be better to take another PC and install separately both services?

 

I need your help please!


 

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Erm... IPCop? Whooo... good old times 😂

 

I think the underlying hardware won’t do you any favour as virtual box is not a bare metal hypervisor and requires an OS where it‘s installed, similar to VMWare Workstation, etc. This will chunk up many of the ressorces of your old hardware.

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9 hours ago, jensmander said:

Erm... IPCop? Whooo... good old times 😂

 

I think the underlying hardware won’t do you any favour as virtual box is not a bare metal hypervisor and requires an OS where it‘s installed, similar to VMWare Workstation, etc. This will chunk up many of the ressorces of your old hardware.

In the organization where I work, IPCop is installed, I see it every day, I am so used to its interface and menus!

On the other hand, you didn't get me out of the doubt, even if I get a better machine, is it recommended to virtualize the NAS in a production environment just as I mentioned in the post?

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7 hours ago, bryanmaster said:

even if I get a better machine, is it recommended to virtualize the NAS in a production environment

Definitly not recommended. 

 

I think everyone agrees that bare metal installations are recommended over virtualized installations.

Though, I am using XPE in my private Homelab since ages in ESXI and a direct-io attached LSI-Controller without any issue or complaints. Thus said, even though it is not recommended it can be used.

 

In a corporate environment I would always recommend to buy a Syno device and live trouble free when it commes to DSM updates.

 

 

 

 

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On 4/24/2021 at 6:23 AM, haydibe said:
On 4/23/2021 at 10:43 PM, bryanmaster said:

even if I get a better machine, is it recommended to virtualize the NAS in a production environment

Definitly not recommended

 

I think everyone agrees that bare metal installations are recommended over virtualized installations.

Though, I am using XPE in my private Homelab since ages in ESXI and a direct-io attached LSI-Controller without any issue or complaints. Thus said, even though it is not recommended it can be used.

 

In a corporate environment I would always recommend to buy a Syno device and live trouble free when it commes to DSM updates.

 

Hmm, not sure I 100% agree with this.  Baremetal is generally simplest and generally preferable if you want to use hardware transcoding, but if you have a complicated hardware platform then VM may be the only option for XPe.  Also, running other workloads side-by-side with XPe on a decent hypervisor like ESXi, is highly preferable to using virtual machines inside DSM, IMHO.

 

So the decision should come down to 1) hardware demands, 2) expectations from the system and 3) personal comfort with managing hypervisors and VM's.

 

My "main" personal system is a VM because I syndicate NVMe enterprise drives into it and there is no other way to support them as primary storage.  I happily ran baremetal on the same system until I decided to try to use those disks.

Edited by flyride
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On 4/23/2021 at 12:26 PM, bryanmaster said:

2. How productive is it to take the physical hard disks of 1TB and another one of 500GB connected by SATA to my board and virtualize them so VirtualBox can recognize them and be able to work with them? Will there be a bad performance?

 

You can do this but there will be some level of performance impact, and it's another layer of services to get corrupted and damaged.  On ESXi my testing indicated something approaching 10% cost to virtualizing storage.  If the storage is fast enough that probably doesn't matter.

 

My preference is to pass through disks into a DSM VM and allow DSM to manage them completely.  Part of the value of DSM is that it is really designed to work directly with the disk hardware for redundancy and data recovery.  Of course, you then need separate storage for the hypervisor and other VM's (technically you could allocated NFS storage from DSM back to support the other VM's, but that can get a bit convoluted).

Edited by flyride
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