Synology NAS ISCSI Query “topic moved” Hi all, Does anyone have a Synology NAS and setup iSCSI? Totally new to ISCSI, never used it before. My HP microserver HD is getting a bit old now and...

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let us know how it goes

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[kev2021]

Will do,

Drives expected to arrive today so hoping to maybe doing in a week or so, Just moving all my shutdown VMs atm and then will shutdown active VMs and re-power on after to keep them up and running.

Will do be quicker to get them back up and running as I only need to move abut 5 VMs to and get them started.  The rest are used adhoc so no major urgency to get them moved back so wont take too long to get main ones back up and running thankfully.

Does anyone know if there is like a batch file equivalent on esxi whereby I could get it to shut down the VM and then copy the folder to a network drive i.e. my NAS and then power it back on when its finished copying it?  Is there then a way to schedule it like a schedule task in Windows?

I’m not familiar with esxi command line / linux etc.

Kev

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[UK Sentinel]

Are you familiar with  ‘shadow copy’ / ‘Snapshot Manager’ ?

 vmware-cmd <cfg> stop will shut down the desired virtual machine

 

Have a look at below useful reference as a few considerations to make:

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/900

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[kev2021]

Thanks, will take a look, just thinking once this is done, be nice to get some kind of automated backup maybe once a month etc of the actual machine as i have a backup of the data held on most of them.  It’s really on my my DC I need a full VM backup of to avoid having to re-join machines to domain etc.

Kev

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Backups are always a tricky balance, not sure how important the data you have is and how often it changes, usually a full backup once a week or month and daily (maybe weekly) differential or Incremental, based on a given backup strategy ?

Confused – Incremental vs differential backup
byu/hellschatt inDataHoarder

 

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[kev2021]

Yes, atm i’m backing nas once a week to a wd usb drive connected at the back.

The VMs have always been a issue as from what i could tell i needed to buy a 3rd party product to install on esxi and then setup/config etc and just wasn’t too sure about doing that.

How I’m copying at the moment is browsing the datastores via vSphere client and literally copying folder for each vm and pasting in other datastore.  When I launch the copied version it pops up and says did u move/copy i choose the default copied and it then launches ok.

Some I have deleted off the original storage. but now I not deleting just copying then later will remove the drives etc.

Kev

 

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[kev2021]

Hi all,

So coming back ground to this and I’ve bought a HP Microserver Gen 10 plus along with a ILO enablement (so can access from my PC remotely via webpage), I saw its compatible on the vmware compatibility list for esxi version 7 so all looking good… I saw it had raid and completely forgot it was software raid (till after I clicked the buy button and started checking more) so its now on its way to me and I’m now loathed to spend approx. £200 on a raid card, of which reviews imply it is slow due to no cache.  I suspect its ok for day to day stuff but IF the raid failed, there are reports of it taking weeks to rebuild due to the slow writes etc so I’m not overly keen albeit I only have 2 x 2TB drives i mirror so not raid 5 etc.  An extra £200 on top of the price of the server is making this expensive so my options are either try ISCSI from synology nas OR I simply setup esxi on drive 1, setup VMs on drives 2 and 3 (no raid/protection) and hope the drives don’t fail and maybe once a month I shut down all my VMs and copy them onto my NAS as a backup – bit time consuming as they will likely take days to copy over.  I was a long process copying all my VMs off the other drives before putting back on the replacement drives in the gen 8.  I can only hope the NIC driver is better on the gen 10 :)

AS the thought of manually backup VMs isn’t something I want to be doing or worrying about loosing data, in order to make the server useable running esxi, I’m coming back to the idea of using my Synology nas as iscsi target and storing my VMs on that and then effectively esxi just loads the VMs from the nas box.

I had a quick look and looks very easy to setup the iSCSI target, however 2 issues:-

1. Which type of iSCSI is best for use on my RAID 5 Synology
2. When I create the ISCSI target, does it then wipe the volume or not as I only have 1 Volume on my NAS and it has all my data on it etc so I can’t afford to wipe it all out.

The guides say click through these steps and done but doesn’t say if it wipes the data or not on the existing volume.

So still trying to find out :)

Anyone know what type is best to use for iSCSI and also does it wipe existing volume when you set it up?

Thanks

Kev

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kev2021 wrote:

So coming back ground to this and I’ve bought a HP Microserver Gen 10 plus along with a ILO enablement (so can access from my PC remotely via webpage), I saw its compatible on the vmware compatibility list for esxi version 7 so all looking good… I saw it had raid and completely forgot it was software raid (till after I clicked the buy button and started checking more)

Your CPU will be busy (smiley face)

 

iSCSI stands for Internet Small Computer Systems Interface. iSCSI is a transport layer protocol that works on top of the Transport Control Protocol (TCP). It enables block-level SCSI data transport between the iSCSI initiator and the storage target over TCP/IP networks. iSCSI supports encrypting the network packets, and decrypts upon arrival at the target.

Your RAID 5 Synology – what hard disk does this have, I forget ?

In my opinion, if you are simple mounted the LUNs as iSCSI targets in VMware, then the data / volumes etc, should remain

 

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[kev2021]

Hiya,

My Synology nas is a DS1819+ which I upgraded the memory on to 16GB ram (it can have a max of 32GB) and I believe I have 1 x 16GB stick in it (Would need to open case / find receipt to prove it).  It is running 5 x 4TB WD Red drives setup in a RAID 5.  It also have 4 network ports bonded together and on the switch side (HP 24 port switch) I have the 4 ports that connect to the nas setup as a trunk so should be giving me approx 4gbps between switch and nas so effectively should mitigate any slowness I hope as all clients are 1gbps so hoping will be ok.  If I move all my VMs to it, I’ll take up approx 1TB of free space.  My plan was to setup a iSCSI target/lun on the Synology box on existing volume (keep all existing data on the volume), then in vmware, add in the Synology iscsi target and then move all VMS to the Synology and then effectively mount the VMs from Synology into vmware and then vmware can then load then up and run them across the network.  Effectively the NAS stores the VM’s and the server would simply run them from the synology nas, basically creating a central storage location.

Never tried this before so its totally new to me and maybe this isn’t very practical…

Kev

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kev2021 wrote:

Effectively the NAS stores the VM’s and the server would simply run them from the synology nas, basically creating a central storage location.

That sounds very sensible ‘central storage location’ if indeed the Synology NAS is RAID 5 and is HArdware RAID, then this is a strong option.

The 5 x 4TB WD Red drives setup in a RAID 5 gives you 16B of real disk spacce and a hot spare, so again, a good choice.

As VMs take up approx 1TB, plenty of room for  good backup, before you start and then go for it.

Will be interesting to see how busy your HP Microserver Gen 10 plus with its  2 x 2TB drives in  RAID 1 is once you have performed the migration ?

The Synology NAS DS1819+ Quad-core, 2.1 GHz CPU and does have the option for adding an Optional 10GbE add-on card to provide high-speed data transfer rate.

Alas your Switch will slow data rates down, so hopefully 10GbE card will not be needed

 

 

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Forgot to ask, what CPU did you opt for in the end for the HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus ?

Xeon E-2224 or Pentium G5420 ?

The Xeon E-2224 – L3 Cache of 8MB and being 4 cores, reads well

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[kev2021]

Hi,

I’m not sure if synology is hardware or software raid tbh, you setup the raid via the GUI.  Yes, total storage space is around 14.3TB and I have approx. 4TB free at present so after moving the VMs over, I will have 3TB free.

I also have 3 free bays in the synology nas but as mentioned earlier, if I want to increase the capacity, I would need to move to a RAID 6 which effectively means adding 1 drive will not give me any additional capacity so I’d have to add 2 drives.  Alternatively, I could add 2 drives and set them up as a new volume in a mirror and host my VMs on that volume but unsure at present which way to go.

At present, I’m thinking use existing volume (providing data isn’t wiped) as that’s the cheapest option as no additional cost is required.

For the Gen 10 plus, I went with the Intel Xeon E-2224 4 Core Processor | 16GB DDR4 2666MHz RAM Intel Xeon E-2224 4 Core Processor | 16GB DDR4 2666MHz RAM.  The Pentium isn’t on the hardware compatibility list for vmware.  I did look at getting another 16GB of ram but I believe it will be EEC memory and that is over £100 for 16GB so for now, as my Gen 8 has only 16GB of ram, I’m going to keep the memory as is and then later in the year, may look at getting an additional 16GB ram to take it to the max 32GB.  I suspect I’ll need that as I need to update my VMs from running win2012R2 to Win 2022 which may involve doing in-place upgrades from 2022R2 to 2016, then maybe to 2019 and then 2022 or maybe I can go from 2016 to 2022 but I believe I need to go to 2016 first.

Alternatively, I setup a new VM’s with 2022 and then migrate the FSMO roles over to the new server and the data and then decomm the existing server and for my other servers, just re-setup from scratch and setup the apps and move the data over, nt sure yet, just focusing on the initial server setup at the moment.

With VMWare, I can use the raid on the Microserver gen 10 plus so by moving the VMs over the synology nas, I’ll then just had 1 drive running the vmware esxi with no redundancy etc it will just be a single drive and that’s it.  The other drives would be independent drives so will have to see what could use them for.

I have read the Microserver, i can plug a USB drive in internally with esxi on and launch it BUT for me, I’m not overly keen on leaving a USB stick inside the machine which is on 24/7/365, most USB sticks get quiet hot when I’ve used them and i’m not sure its viable tbh.  I can see if being ok if you only use the server for a short while and then turn it off etc but having it on 24/7, I’m not sure is viable, better with a HDD/SSD I think.

I thought about putting a SSD in the Gen 10 for esxi but tbh I’m not sure I’d see much advantage as esxi is a relatively small OS and doesn’t take too long to boot up on HHDs, its the actual VMs that take a while to boot up (I have approx 4 i think that power on when the machine is powered on) and overall they take probably 5 mins all be reachable but as I don’t turn it off that frequently, its not a huge deal.

The Synology nas is good but I feel that have skimped a little on CPU, it is a INTEL Atom C3538 2.1ghz 4 core CPU, I’d sooner of seen a non atom CPU tbh as they not as good as regular CPUs. From looking at reviews at the time, I think a lot of people were expecting them to move away from Atom CPUs but they didn’t which was a bit of a let down.

Yes, switch is all 1GBps but I’m hoping have 4 x 1gbps in a trunk giving me 4gbps from switch to nas, will be enough to manage simultaneous connections etc as each device is 1gbps max meaning it has 3gbps extra to facility VMs running etc. I believe my HP switch 1810G i think it is has 2 fibre ports but I think they are 1Gb fibre ports not 10gbe.

Yes, synology has ability to a 10GBe card but I’d then have to change all the cabling running round the house to newer cables and also get 10gbe cards for my PC etc so more expense and its not really needed at the moment, as long as the VMs will run and perform ok from synology NAS and it doesn’t impact ability to open/save files, copy files, watching films from the nas then I’m hoping it will be ok but will have to see as never done it before.

Also will need to see what the CPU/memory usage is like on the synology nas when I have the gen 10 loading 4 VMs from the nas, I expect network traffic to increase and likely CPU but maybe not memory.  If memory does increase a lot then I can always get more ram for it at a later date.

I also think in the new esxi that have altered it now so I may not need 1 of my VMs anymore wo will mean only 3 VMs running on start up :)  Will be interesting to see what speed is like loading the VMs and using the VMs.

Kev

 

 

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kev2021 wrote:

For the Gen 10 plus, I went with the Intel Xeon E-2224 4 Core Processor | 16GB DDR4 2666MHz RAM Intel Xeon E-2224 4 Core Processor | 16GB DDR4 2666MHz RAM.

Nice,

kev2021 wrote:

The Pentium isn’t on the hardware compatibility list for vmware

Good point, had not thought of that, when are you planning this migration, anytime soon ?

kev2021 wrote:

I have read the Microserver, i can plug a USB drive in internally with esxi on and launch it BUT for me

Use the USB drive for the backup, or purchase a cheap USB memory stick for same ?

 

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[kev2021]

Waiting for it to arrive and then ilo enablement as had to get that somewhere else.  I’m still trying to work out the ISCSI as can’t find any info on if it wipes data when you set it up or not so looking at some options on that but I’m hoping to do it this month, should have the items within the next 2 weeks so will go from there.

Kev

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kev2021 wrote:

I’m still trying to work out the ISCSI as can’t find any info on if it wipes data when you set it up or not so looking at some options on that but I’m hoping to do it this month,

I think you will be Ok, but understand your caution, there is online storage options like https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/#cost-calc where you can rent based on amount and duration, but assume your DSL connection is only VDSL speeds, so will take forever ?

Or pick up from Ebay (or simular) a used LTO-8 or newer External Tape Drive and use compression.

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