WilliamLam.com

Search Results for: synology

Synology NFS VAAI Plug-in support for vSphere 8.0

by // 6 Comments

After sharing my recent Synology DS723+ setup for my Homelab, where I initially decided on using iSCSI storage since it had out of the box support for VMware vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI), I had received a number of comments and recommendations to actually stay away from iSCSI and just use NFS due to the various inconsistent and performance issues that other users have observed with the Synology.

The only reason I opted for iSCSI was purely for its VAAI support, I certainly would have preferred to use NFS for its simplicity of setup and management. Timing could not have been better as I recently came to learn on the VMware Reddit channel, u/MrGimper had shared an update that they were successful in installing and consuming the latest version of the Synology NFS VAAI Plug-In (2.0-1109) on an ESXi 8.0 system, even though vSphere 7.0 was the highest supported version from Synology.

Disclaimer: Synology does not officially support vSphere 8.0, please use at your own risk. I did hear back from Synology and their current stance on support for vSphere 8.0 with their NFS VAAI Plug-In is that "They do not know when the next version will be supported".

I had considered installing the latest Synology VAAI plug-in but I figured since vSphere 8.0 was not listed as supported, that it probably would not install but this actually gave me some hope, so I decided to try this out on my vSphere 8.0 Update 1 setup.

[Read more...]

Synology DS723+ in Homelab

by // 15 Comments

While I am a huge fan and a happy user of vSAN in my homelab environment, it can sometimes be challenging when you only have a single node (yes, this is not a best practice nor recommended). For example, I have not been able to upgrade to the latest vSAN Disk Group version because my vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) is also running on top of vSAN which prevents the upgrade operation from completing as changes to the vSAN Disk Group is required.


I honestly have been putting this maintenance off for quite some time but right before VMware Explore, I got an opportunity from Synology to check out one of their storage offerings, the DS723+. While I have never worked with a Synology product before, I know many in the VMware Community use their DiskStation NAS for a number of use cases from VM/Application backup, file sharing, and certainly external storage for ESXi. I also found it interesting that you can also run certain types of applications directly on the NAS, which certainly pique my interest 🙂

With VMware Explore US now behind us, I finally got a chance to play with the DS723+ which has the following configuration:

Note: For those interested, there is also DS723+ bundle (includes 2 x 4TB SATA disk) on Amazon

[Read more...]

My VCF 9 Lab Network Diagram

by // 3 Comments

During VMware Explore, I had a request from an attendee who was interested in my physical networking and how it is all connected for my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 Lab setup. The network diagram below is based on the following VCF 9.0 Hardware BOM (Build-of-Material) and using the following network configuration with additional commentary on each connection in the write-up below.


Note: All green lines in the diagram above represent 10GbE network connectivity and all blue lines in the diagram above represent 2.5GbE network connectivity.

[Read more...]