Today i was working with storage topics. I tried to create iSCSI connections in my vSphere homelab and tried to figure out how to connect or mount iSCSI storage. I had already some iSCSI storage connected to my nested ESXi hosts. But i felt as there is something not correct. And i was right. After some research on the internet i’ve found out that you should take another approach to add iSCSI storage as i did in my previous post. There is a way that your new iSCSI storage on your Synology NAS is fully vSphere and VAAI compatible. Let me show you how you do that.
- Before we start to create storage and add it to our ESXi hosts you have to install the VAAI plugin from Synology:
- Reboot your hosts after plugin installation
Now your hosts are ready to get connected to your VAAI supported Synology NAS. Let’s create now the iSCSI LUNs in the next step.
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Login to your Synology NAS webinterface (https://synology-ip:5000).
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Open Storage Manager and click on iSCSI LUN.
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Click on “Create”.
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In the “Choose LUN type” screen click the first option “iSCSI LUN (File-Level)”.
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Now you can see different settings. Choose “Advanced file LUN” at “LUN type”.
At “Advanced LUN allocation unit size” look for “8KB (Optimized for VMware VAAI)”.
Type in a LUN name and also capazity as you like or need.
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Go ahead and mount the newly created iSCSI LUN to your ESXi hosts.
After mounting the storage you should see that hardware acceleration is now supported.
To verify that all is setup properly open a SSH console (PuTTY) and connect to your ESXi host.
With the following command you can check a little deeper if the VAAI primitives are supported:
esxcli storage core device vaai status get
The result should look like this:
