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.
