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Should I go for bare metal or ESXi?


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I have build my own NAS with 8GB ram. At this moment I have Jun's loader running on a 64GB usb 3.0 flash drive but I am thinking about installing an M.2 SSD and installing ESXi on it.

Now my question is, what will this do in terms of performance? Will XPenology perform the same way on ESXi as it does bare metal, or will performance go down?

 

The reason I wan't to use ESXi is that I can install another VM. At this moment I use an old Windows 10 Computer to do some internet browsing and run Kodi on (it is connected to my TV), it would be nice to just connect my NAS with an HDMI cable to my TV so I won't need the Windows computer any longer. Some advice would be nice :smile:

 

Thanks in advance!

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I run both bare metal and vm version and there is not much difference in performance if any at all. My vm is very snappy. Think I've given it 4 virtual cpu's and 4gig ram and its on sas drives and i max out the gig interface in both read and write. The other bonus with vm is there is no need for the usb sick. 64gig stick for xpenology is a huge waste...you can use 4 gig and it will be fine...it does not even need to be fast...it's just the firmware part that runs from usb...DSM gets installed on your selected storage hard drives in a 2gig partition...so the usb is literally used only at boot.

Vm is just so easy.

My 2 cents anyway

 

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I started with ESXi, but am now running it bare metal. ESXi was fine, but I didn't need any extra VM hosting. You can do that now inside DSM with virtual machine manager anyway. I wanted to give DSM local access ALL of the HDD for smart testing. I wanted push button power button support, USB support

 

One item you should consider is that bare metal install means that you need DSM to include your driver support whereas with esxi you need vSphere to include your driver support. This might be a deal breaker either direction, depends what you have.

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Yeah i just mentioned 4gig stick as that is about the smallest usb size you can purchase these days...well at least where i am.

But yeah as stated if you have a very old usb that is even smaller that will do just fine to.

 

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...What I dislike Virtual Machine route is that your virtual disk will always fail the smart(hard drive) check, and Synology constantly write the errors to the logs.

That's also what I stayed away from VM since I found it.

Besides, as mervincm said, I don't need any extra VM hosting either. So why bother?

Just my .02.

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Designed to run on bare metal? As was unix, linux, freebsd, openbsd, solaris, whatever. However, they all work fine in VMs as well. Did you know a LOT of embedded systems are running inside of a VM of sorts? There is no magic about a VM that will make the linux the NAS is built on run like s**t. However, unsupported bare metal hardware will. There is that. If everyone relied solely on what software was "designed" to run on, we would all be limited to the very expensive hardware created by a certain three-letter named company and been happy with whatever they decided we needed. We would not have been okay to buy our own, different hardware, to run the software on because it wasn't designed to run on non-whatever company hardware.

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Designed to run on bare metal? As was unix, linux, freebsd, openbsd, solaris, whatever. However, they all work fine in VMs as well. Did you know a LOT of embedded systems are running inside of a VM of sorts? There is no magic about a VM that will make the linux the NAS is built on run like s**t. However, unsupported bare metal hardware will. There is that. If everyone relied solely on what software was "designed" to run on, we would all be limited to the very expensive hardware created by a certain three-letter named company and been happy with whatever they decided we needed. We would not have been okay to buy our own, different hardware, to run the software on because it wasn't designed to run on non-whatever company hardware.

 

You're talking about virtualising an operating system designed to manage low level RAID. I personally would much prefer to run that on bare metal hardware.

 

 

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I agree with b0fh and also prefer Esxi. SMART works as long as you passthrough a Sata controller.

NeoID, I checked your blog posts or video tutorials but didn't see any instruction talking about SMART works as long as we passthrough a Sata controller.

I'm running a virtual machine on VMWare WS 12 and have no way to "passthrough Sata controller."

Can you (or anybody) help?

Thanks.

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I agree with b0fh and also prefer Esxi. SMART works as long as you passthrough a Sata controller.

NeoID, I checked your blog posts or video tutorials but didn't see any instruction talking about SMART works as long as we passthrough a Sata controller.

I'm running a virtual machine on VMWare WS 12 and have no way to "passthrough Sata controller."

Can you (or anybody) help?

Thanks.

 

It's quite simple. Just install the PCI card in your server and configure your virtual machine. After that you can go to "Manage"->"Hardware" (if you use the ESXi webUI) and enable the device for pass-through. A server reboot is required after you've enabled it.

 

I5QnE5c.png

 

After the reboot edit your virtual machine and add "PCI device" and select your PCI device from the list of available devices.

 

zsCmy1u.png

 

I have DSM 6.0 running for quite some time no without any issues. I'm planning on upgrading my DSM 5.2 guide for ESXi soon. Everything works like on real hardware except SNMP, so SMART is working without issues here. :smile:

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Now my question is, what will this do in terms of performance? Will XPenology perform the same way on ESXi as it does bare metal, or will performance go down?

 

In terms of performance if you can pass-through the hard disk controller using the vt-d (or amd equivalent) you have no visible differences.

I have to admit that from my tests, using only one lan, I can't see any difference even if I don't use vt-d and use a .vmdk disk (one on every single physical hard disk) or direct disk access, but it all depends on the type of workload you apply.

 

However If you can't use vt-d because your cpu doesn't have it nor the direct disk access, and you can only use .vmdk, I don't recommend using the .vmdk, too much troubles on recovering files if something goes wrong, so try to go with baremetal in this case.

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Designed to run on bare metal? As was unix, linux, freebsd, openbsd, solaris, whatever. However, they all work fine in VMs as well. Did you know a LOT of embedded systems are running inside of a VM of sorts? There is no magic about a VM that will make the linux the NAS is built on run like s**t. However, unsupported bare metal hardware will. There is that. If everyone relied solely on what software was "designed" to run on, we would all be limited to the very expensive hardware created by a certain three-letter named company and been happy with whatever they decided we needed. We would not have been okay to buy our own, different hardware, to run the software on because it wasn't designed to run on non-whatever company hardware.

 

You're talking about virtualising an operating system designed to manage low level RAID. I personally would much prefer to run that on bare metal hardware.

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

NO - I am talking about a general purpose OS that in this case has been slightly customized to run Synology apps. The apps were written to run on Linux. The only thing that really gimps the packages is their own version of DRM (is that even the right word here?) so people cannot do exactly what the Xpenology project does. Don't assume that IoT devices or NAS devices run custom, purpose-built OS. They don't. They just use busybox, linux, whatever, that is already built and bolt on their customizations. Very little is custom OS anymore.

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On 6/5/2017 at 9:48 AM, miicker said:

I have build my own NAS with 8GB ram. At this moment I have Jun's loader running on a 64GB usb 3.0 flash drive but I am thinking about installing an M.2 SSD and installing ESXi on it.

Now my question is, what will this do in terms of performance? Will XPenology perform the same way on ESXi as it does bare metal, or will performance go down?

 

The reason I wan't to use ESXi is that I can install another VM. At this moment I use an old Windows 10 Computer to do some internet browsing and run Kodi on (it is connected to my TV), it would be nice to just connect my NAS with an HDMI cable to my TV so I won't need the Windows computer any longer. Some advice would be nice :smile:

 

Thanks in advance!

Are you willing to learn to use ESXi, does your CPU and motherboard support Vt-d, will your SAS/SATA controller pass through to a VM the way you expect. Google is your friend, see if what you have will work. Intel, AMD, VMware and your hardware makers all have what you need to know.  Remember to do it right, unlike many who are to lazy.

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