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How to setup private GitLab on a Synology for Project Keswick?

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My recent blog post on setting up a custom vSphere Content Library on my Synology gave me another idea that I had been thinking about regarding Project Keswick, which was announced back at VMware Explore Las Vegas.

If you have network connectivity to the Keswick Cloud Service, you can easily associate a Git repository, which is used for host configurations and workload deployments using GitOps using Github or even a privately managed Gitlab instance. For organizations that have additional compliance, security or air-gapped requirements, using the Keswick Cloud Service may not be an option. With that said, Project Keswick also supports an advanced deployment option where the association of a Git repository, such as GitLab, can also be accomplished without requiring the use of the Keswick Cloud Service.

While I have had experience using both Github as well as GitLab, which VMware uses to host its own code repository, I have actually never setup my own GitLab instance before. I thought this would be a great learning opportunity, especially with the ability to run additional add-on applications on a Synology.

After a bit of researching online, I found that GitLab can easily run as a Container workload and it just so happens that the Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM) has a package for running containers creatively called Container Manager and below are the step by step instructions for setting up GitLab running on Synology DSM 7.2.

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How to setup custom vSphere Content Library on a Synology?

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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.

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Synology NFS VAAI Plug-in support for vSphere 8.0

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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.

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