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I use ESXi with Xpenology. I have four 2Tb hard drives which use RDM to be passed through directly to Xpenology. Is there a better way to be doing this? e.g. I'm thinking about giving ESXi access to the four drives and creating a VM disk for Xpenology. My concern here is that I'll lose the advantages of the Xpenology RAID.
Opinions and advice would be gratefully received.
Just to confirm this is a one box solution, with a VM running the nas software?
Exactly as you say.
So I don't know anything about XPenology, so I'm not sure of the advantages of the XPenology RAID that you mention. If you're using RDM then your guest VM has physical access to the hardware: if you instead create VMDKs on the disks and map these through to the the VM then you gain the benefit of portability, snapshots and the like. That said, I guess you're talking virtual mode RDM anyways, so you can snapshot these anyways.
Ultimately only you know what the abstraction layer is worth to you. Do you need all of the 4 disks for NAS? Most labs can get by with less disk space than you might need if you trim your VMs.
It's not a lab. The four disks were originally part of a bare metal implementation of Xpenology. When I installed ESXi and the Xpenology VM, the best way at the time to give the VM access to the disks without wiping them was to use RDM. My concern over using VMDKs is that if something goes wrong with a physical disk then there's no failover is there?
Without RAID, no. If your VMDK is layered atop a RAID then it's a different story, of course.Quote:
Originally Posted by Bluecube
That said... it might be a good idea to explain more about what you're trying to achieve: ESXi just gives you an abstraction layer (and potentially portability) over your hardware in this situation. If you have no cluster then you are going to struggle to fail over to a second host. If it's just a NAS though, and you're trying to squeeze in ESXi for tech's sake then I probably wouldn't bother.
It's a full fat server - a home made Xeon setup. I've a few VMs on it alongside the Xpenology VM. All the VMs currently reside on a 250Gb hard drive which is also the datastore. Separate from that is the four NAS drives. I'm just wondering if there's any point in making the four drives a datastore and creating four VMDKs for the NAS functions. From what you're saying, that's a no.
The motherboard does support hardware RAID but I'm wary of using that given that if the mobo goes then it'll take the RAID with it.
Did you try to go to http://xpenology.com/forum/ ?
I would just stick with the Xpenology RAID.
Also,what you mean if your mono goes,your RAID is gone also? Can't it be configured with some semi-universal settings allowing portation?
Or how about a cheap RAID card (Dell or such)?