The ability to run a diverse set of custom add-on applications from backup, security, multimedia, developer tools and many more directly on a Synology NAS makes it extremely versatile and can enable a number of new capabilities within your environment.
While browsing through the packages, I noticed there is a WebStation package which can be used to host a basic website (can also support advanced web applications). This immediately gave me an idea as I can now host my own custom vSphere Content Library, also referred to as a 3rd party content library that are managed outside of vCenter Server, directly on the Synology!
Note: Installing add-on applications will consume additional CPU and memory resources on your Synology, make sure you have enough resources, especially memory before running additional services on your Synology.
Pre-requisite:
- An already created 3rd party content library that is ready to be hosted
- To learn more about what and how to create your own 3rd party content library, please refer to this blog post for more details.
Step 1 - Login to the Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM) and open up the Package Center on the desktop. Search for the Web Station application and initiate the installation.
Step 2 - Next, we need to install the backend host application and Apache HTTP Server will be sufficient. Search for the application and then start the installation.
Step 3 - Finally, from the DSM desktop, navigate to File Station and you should now see a new directory called web, which is the root directory of your web server. You can now create a new folder that will house one of your 3rd party content libraries. In my example, I have a 3rd party content library that contains all of my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliances and I have named the folder nested-esxi.
Step 4 - You can upload the directory structure of your 3rd party content library using the File Station, but I found this to be really inefficient because it can not upload folders directly and I have a lot of directories and files to upload.
Instead, I opted for using SCP command-line utility which will require you to enable SSH access on the Synology by going to Control Panel->Security->Terminal & SNMP and selecting the Enable SSH Service and click on the apply button for change to go into effect.
If you are on macOS, I found out the hard way that the SCP utility actually defaults to the SFTP protocol rather than SSH, which I thought was quite strange. In any case, it considers the SCP protocol as legacy ... After a bit of searching online, I found that you can enable the "legacy" SCP option by simply passing in the -O option to the command line and now you can easily transfer your entire 3rd party content library directory structure to the Synology.
Here is an example SCP command where I am already in the root folder of my locally created 3rd party content library and I want to recursively transfer all files to my nested-esxi directory is located under /volume1/web, where volume1 is the label of your Synology volume.
scp -O -r * admin[at]nas.primp-industries[dot]local:/volume1/web/nested-esxi/
To verify that everything has been configured correctly, you should be able to access one of your files such as the 3rd party content library lib.json by opening a browser to the following URL (replace with your own values):
https://nas.primp-industries.local/nested-esxi/lib.json
If that opened up successfully, we are now ready to consume our 3rd party content library by creating a new subscribed library as shown in the screenshot below and providing the URL which will be https://nas.primp-industries.local/nested-esxi/lib.json (replace with your own values)
One the new subscribed content library is setup, we can now deploy from our 3rd party content library hosted on our Synology! 😁
William, this is excellent - longtime Synology user, I run DNS and Mail servers etc on it. The flexibility is hard to match. Question for you based on my limited VMWare-specific knowledge - is there a recommended way that you've seen to backup my guest VM's to the Synology? Would the Backup for Business be a good choice for periodic backups? I will have some pretty critical workloads on ESXi soon and will still support my legacy Xserves running ESXi (total of about 30 VM's across 3xApple XServes), wondering whether I should be using the Synology to back them up. And if the best answer is "dude, use VSan!" just tell me that and I'll start down that path instead. So far, all my ESXi hosts are local hosts with local storage only (SSDs typically), but I get why people use shared storage, that part is not a stretch. Just wondering best practices for my kind of "small-ish VM deployments" with 3 or 4 hosts - I don't use my VCenter server even yet, though I do have it deployed now on an old 2012 Mac Mini as you may recall. Thanks a ton for the incredible site and your ongoing knowledge share.
Thanks for the comment Brian! Yea, I'm really liking the versatility of the Synology and it can even run Containers, which adds even more possibilities on top of the existing applications they support.
I've not used their VM backup solution, so I can't really comment. I know few in the community do use their Synology for backups, but its not clear if this is VM level protection and/or in-guest. Maybe someone with more knowledge can comment and their experience or if you've searched online as I know other VMware community members have also shared their Synology experiences. In addition to Synology backups, there's always the popular options from Veeam and there's even my personal favorite ghettoVCB. Due to my use of the homelab, backups don't make much sense as I don't have much running that's persisted and if it blows up (which it has due to bad NVMe drive), I simply rebuild via Automation, so even configurations isn't much of a pain but I know that's not the case for everyone including VCSA, NSX backups which can you certainly use your Synology for