Synology

Storage performance upgrade – and how to make use of Vmknic binding

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It’s been a while now (exactly two years and one month), since I bought my last Synology NAS, both for homelab and personal/private usage. Why did I buy a new NAS? There are some requirements that my new NAS had to fulfill:

  • Capable of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (integrated or with an addon card)
  • Enough slots for disks (at least five)
  • Two NVMe slots for using NVMe SSDs as read/write cache (integrated or with an addon card)
  • Can be used for homelab storage, as well as backup storage for home computers, laptops, etc.

When looking for that one NAS that could handle all of the above, I stumbled across the Synology DS1621xs+. Synology launched it in September 2020, and I ordered it about two months later.

Some of the technical specifications of the NAS:

  • It has 2 x M.2 2280 NVMe slots
  • It comes with 8 GB DDR4 ECC SODIMM (expandable up to 32 GB, and yes I upgraded to 32 GB)
  • It is equipped with an Intel Xeon D-1527 4-core 2.2 GHz CPU that has a Turbo Boost up to 2.7 GHz
  • In terms of connectivity, there are two 1 GbE and one 10 GbE RJ-45 ports
  • If you fancy, you could install some PICe card (the NAS has one 8-lane x8 slot), but I don’t know why or what
  • And you can install up to six 3.5″ or 2.5″ drives

So that’s the basics covered. Let’s get back to the topic.

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How to create custom (storage) reports on your Synology NAS

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The vExperts had the chance to attend an exclusive online session recently together with Synology. The topic was “Flexible VM backup and recovery solutions with Synology”. Josue Guzman, Technical Account Manager at Synology, showed us how to set up and use the VM backup solution. He demoed also the whole backup and restore process. And especially the instant restore option, where the Synology NAS mounts itself as an NFS datastore into your ESXi host was awesome.

Many thanks to Corey Romero and the vExpert team for organizing all these cool sessions!

But I’m not going to recap the session here. I just want to pick up the thread because there is a not-inconsiderable amount of space required with backup. And if you also have specific RTO and RPO that have to hold data for a certain period of time, then the storage requirement can be quite large.

And that’s exactly the thread I want to pick up. When you’re working with Synology NAS systems, you may know how cumbersome it sometimes is to get the size of the various (shared) folders you have on your NAS. Sure, you can do “right-click => select Properties” on every folder, note it down somewhere, and then you can add all the values together. But who wants that?

But there is a much nicer and more elegant way to get the folder size. And at the end, you even see colored pie charts. Well, are you curious now?

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An easy way to quickly migrate a VMware VM to Synology VMM

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When it comes to virtualization, I’m working with VMware products in my homelab, alongside (hardware) products from other manufacturers. But some special circumstances made a special solution to a problem necessary. Due to a month of military duty, when I was at home only for the weekend, I shut down my homelab. Not also due to this fact, but also because I’m currently building my own customized rack, where I will install my homelab hardware. Be sure to check my blog frequently to get more information about the rack, as I will blog about it soon!

What’s the reason for this migration?

I’m using Ubiquiti hardware for my networking (lab switches, home networking, including wireless), and also a Pi-Hole as my ad-blocker. These are the only “business-critical” services in my home network. And they were running on my homelab. But what should I do when I shut down everything? Well, VMware Workstation to the rescue! I’m (actually, I was) running an ESXi on VMware Workstation on my gaming computer. This ESXi server was managed with vCenter as a replication target for Veeam Backup and Replication. Quickly migrate the VMs to that virtual ESXi host, and that’s it. But what when I accidentally shut down this PC? Or I want to shut it down? I need another solution which is more like 24/7!

What’s the solution?

That made me think about Synology. I knew that at least some Synology NAS systems can run virtual workloads directly, either as a virtual machine or within Docker. I didn’t want to go with Docker because of the lack of knowledge, and I have only limited system resources on that NAS box. So it will be two VMs running on my Synology box! But how?

You can’t just vmotion your VMware VM to Synology VMM (Virtual Machine Manager). You can export the VMDK files or create an OVF, which you then import into Synology VMM. But that took to long, somehow (in certain circumstances I can be impatient …).

This blog post will show you how you can easily backup your VMware VMs to a Synology box, with their own toolset, and restore it directly into Synology VMM. It might come in handy, in case you’re searching also for a nifty solution to run a Pi-Hole or a Ubiquiti controller. Or some other small VMs.

To be honest, the Synology box isn’t a Ferrari, or a Fright Liner in terms of performance and / or capacity. Such a NAS is always somehow limited in CPU resources and memory. In my case, I was happy that I maxed-out the memory when I initially bought the NAS box. My current NAS looks like this:

You can see, there are not many resources, but it should be fine for some tiny Linux VM. A domain controller can even run on it if the resources are used sparingly. But don’t expect too much… And let’s dive into the topic now.

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Synology now with backup for Office 365

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Long time no hear, and I’m really sorry for that. It was a busy time, with a new job, huge project and also military duty in between. But now things are calming down, and so do I. And I’ve got some time for a new blog post.

Recently i stumbled across a newsletter from Synology. They now have a backup tool for Office 365 available which is free of costs for 10 users. Extra license packs can be purchased for adding and renewing additional licenses. That doesn’t sound so bad. But wait. Office 365 is in the cloud, doesn’t Microsoft back it up so that I don’t have to worry about? Well, long story short, NO. There is some retention like deleted items and stuff, and you can modify specific settings. But backing up Office 365 data is all in your own responsibility. There are various backup solutions like Veeam Backup for Office 365 which work absolutely great, and also the recently announced solution from Synology which I’m writing about today. Let’s look at it a little closer.

Unfortunately not every Synolgy NAS system is supported, so please have a look at the list here if your devices is on it or not. Lucky me, i bought a new NAS for my vSphere homelab some months ago which fits perfectly for this test setup.

Supported NAS systems

  • 18 series:FS1018, RS3618xs, RS818RP+, RS818+, RS2818RP+, RS2418RP+, RS2418+, DS3018xs, DS418play, DS918+, DS718+, DS218+, DS1618+
  • 17 series:FS3017, FS2017, RS3617xs, RS3617RPxs, RS4017xs+, RS3617xs+, RS18017xs+, DS3617xs, DS1817+, DS1517+
  • 16 series:RS2416RP+, RS2416+, RS18016xs+, DS416play, DS916+, DS716+II, DS716+, DS216+II, DS216+
  • 15 series:RS815RP+, RS815+, RC18015xs+, DS3615xs, DS415+, DS2415+, DS1815+, DS1515+
  • 14 series:RS3614xs, RS3614RPxs, RS814RP+, RS814+, RS3614xs+, RS2414RP+, RS2414+
  • 13 series:RS3413xs+, RS10613xs+, DS713+, DS2413+, DS1813+, DS1513+
  • 12 series:RS3412xs, RS3412RPxs, RS812RP+, RS812+, RS2212RP+, RS2212+, DS3612xs, DS712+, DS412+, DS1812+, DS1512+
  • 11 series:RS3411xs, RS3411RPxs, RS2211RP+, RS2211+, DS3611xs, DS411+II, DS411+, DS2411+, DS1511+

More information about Active Backup for Office 365

Synology has plenty of information about Active Backup for Office 365 on their website.

Some of the features:

  • Protection of mail, calendar, contacts, OneDrive
  • With Active Backup for Office 365 Portal enabled, both employees and admins can easily locate items for restoration and restore/export them with simple clicks
  • Mail/calendar attachments (if stored in Btrfs volumes) and OneDrive files that contain identical content will only be stored to Synology NAS once, which saves storage space
  • Files stored in Btrfs volumes on Synology NAS can be deduplicated with previous versions, minimizing the storage space required

But now let’s talk tech and let’s dive into the setup and configuration of Active Backup for Office 365.

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VMware – Create VAAI supported iSCSI LUNs on Synology

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VAAI

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.

  1. Before we start to create storage and add it to our ESXi hosts you have to install the VAAI plugin from Synology:
    1. How do I install Synology NFS VAAI Plug-in on an ESXi host?
  2. 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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