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Running XPenology in VM


cougar014

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Hello,

 

I have a few questions regarding XPEnology.

 

I want to run a single server with a fileserver on one side and windows on the other side.

To accomplish this I want to use VMware ESXi to create 2 virtual machines (VM). One for XPEnology and one for windows.

 

BUT

First i looked into FREEnas to use as fileserver OS.

But freenas has one downside. I does not like it when it is ran in a VM.

It is possible, but with A LOT of work and even then it is considered "unreliable" and with a lot of maintenance.

 

So my question is:

How does XPEnology perform when it is ran in a VM?

Is it stable?

How safe is my storage?

How big are the changes my data get corrupted?

 

And is this all possible without using any fancy and expensive host bus adapters etc? So just with the motherboards storage controllers?

 

 

Thanks in advance!

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I use Xpenology in an esxi 6.5 vm environment. I dedicate 6GB Ram and 3 vCPUs as well as passing through 2 controllers to the VM. So far, it hasn't failed and as the boot image is the only thing stored within the esxi environment, any failures to ESXi do not affect the DSM storage drives, you can also take a snapshot of the VM before passing through any controllers which makes it easy to rebuild should the vm boot image have an issue.

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You don't need to really. You can pass virtual disks, RDM disks (real disks but still controlled to a certain extent by ESXi) and full passthrough of the controller. RDM is actually a very useful tool as it doesn't drop the controller to the VM, the main issue is that sometimes things like SMART don't work correctly.

 

RDM and controller passthrough should generally be of a similar speed and performance, with virtual drives being so much slower. My predominant reason for using controller passthrough and not RDM is that I wanted to segregate my DSM drives from my vSphere vSAN setup.

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