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Moving from VM to baremetal


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I currently utilise Xpenology in an ESXi environment and I am wishing to move to a baremetal for various reasons. I have a number of questions:

 

1) I intend to increase the number of NICs available using Intel 1GBe cards.  Is there a maximum number of NICs that DSM supports? My install currently has 1 stupidly and I want to push to 4. 

2) If I move my current VM to baremetal, how can I initiate the loader to re-detect the hardware, presume I use the reinstall option in the loader on boot and then re-install DSM?

3) Does Xpenology/DSM work with UPS's to shutdown?  I use a 1920w Dell UPS with management card and I want to ensure that I can shut down the machine when power becomes critical.

 

Thanks,

 

Chris

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1 - Synology higher end machines have up to 4 NICs if I am not mistaken. You can double check that on their website. Not sure you actually need more than that anyway.

2 - I am not sure but I think you cannot just switch from VM to Baremetal just like. You would need to reinstall DSM fresh on a drive and then move your data over the network to the new baremetal installation. I will let other chime on this as I do not know ESXI well enough.

3 - It should work although I am unsure of that specific UPS. Is that a UPS recommended by Synology?

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From my experience

1) I've used a quad port Intel card (cheap second hand from eBay) which works fine. You will need to edit grub to insert the 4 Mac addresses

2) Depending on your disk controller/hdd setup (pass through etc) you might just be able to boot with the loader and migrate/repair however I would take a backup of all data and config and also disconnect drives and do a full hardware test with your controller. You might need to restore data.

3) DSM supports a number of snmp ups, I've apc snmp setup on several real/xpe boxes. Check the synology website for compatible ups, but I think dell rebadge apc so you might have an easy path. I think there is a generic snmp ups option in DSM with would give basic features with any signalling. If the ups has usb, that might work too.

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Thanks,

 

1) I've got an intel quad port so will use that, and disable the supermicro onboard NICs as I won't need them.

2) I'm on full passthrough of the drive controllers so DSM is on real HDDs, I moved the other way and essentially created a new loader VM disk but I presume I would need to build USB stick with the PID/VID setup and the MAC addresses of the NICs (as above)?  Do this and then select reinstall option?

3) Its a rebranded APC, just reasonable power capacity and rack mounted.  The management card does SNMP so that should be fine to do this.  What functions do you have over SNMP?

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6 hours ago, Benoire said:

Thanks,

 

1) I've got an intel quad port so will use that, and disable the supermicro onboard NICs as I won't need them.

2) I'm on full passthrough of the drive controllers so DSM is on real HDDs, I moved the other way and essentially created a new loader VM disk but I presume I would need to build USB stick with the PID/VID setup and the MAC addresses of the NICs (as above)?  Do this and then select reinstall option?

3) Its a rebranded APC, just reasonable power capacity and rack mounted.  The management card does SNMP so that should be fine to do this.  What functions do you have over SNMP?

2) Correct, follow the installation tutorial on how to create a usb disk with vid/pid etc and your mac addresses. NOTE - if your current DSM is 'higher than' the base boot loader you might have some issues. Recommend you create your boot disk, disconnect your raid drives an on a spare hdd do a clean build install of DSM and then update it via control panel etc to match the DSM version you are running live. That will 'write back' to the USB disk the same DSM version and minimise risks. That will also prove your USB/grub setup is correct. However again recommend a full backup before any messing about :)

3) With APC/SNMP you get the full DSM options to shutdown on battery level or time. You can also use that DSM as a UPS 'server' to other DSM boxes

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  • 1 month later...

@sbv3000 thanks and resureccting this!  I've created the USB and it running on a spare machine with a different HDD so its now at the latest level that my vDSM is.  The new baremetal setup is using a quad 1GBe NIC on a supermicro motherboard, the USB grub is setup to use four NICs with MAC addresses linked to the serial.  My vDSM is configured with only 1 NIC, is there going to be any issues with the current setup if I move from virtual with 1 NIC to baremetal with 4 NIC?  Do I need to use the reinstall option or just let it boot up?

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On 18/03/2018 at 9:28 PM, Benoire said:

@sbv3000 thanks and resureccting this!  I've created the USB and it running on a spare machine with a different HDD so its now at the latest level that my vDSM is.  The new baremetal setup is using a quad 1GBe NIC on a supermicro motherboard, the USB grub is setup to use four NICs with MAC addresses linked to the serial.  My vDSM is configured with only 1 NIC, is there going to be any issues with the current setup if I move from virtual with 1 NIC to baremetal with 4 NIC?  Do I need to use the reinstall option or just let it boot up?

If the bare metal is working ok with all 4 nics getting an ip address, then moving the drives from vm to bare should 'just work'.

Something you may want to do as a test is to set up a new passthough hdd on the vm, create a volume etc, then swap that to the bare metal machine. That way you will prove that the controllers are compatible and you wont damage the raid/

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