best NAS Solution to run as a VM ?

Randall8686 · 24 Aug 2015 at 09:26

So im looking to thin down the hardware in my "games Room" as its getting rather full. I was to take out a synology and a N54L as they are not really needed any more. However i will need a nas solution for sharing files with friends and family and also supplying DLNA media around the house. So i want to run somthing on my Xeon based server, ideally i dont want anything too CPU hungry and well ram it can have what it needs. So what do you all use/feel is the best toption for a "VM" ? I have run Xpenology as a VM on my N54L but worried about the loosing data thing as its all stored in its funky SHR raid config. is there a safe way of running the xpenology software where i can recover data if it all goes T1ts up. also should i raid the drives or let the xpenology do its own raid ?

OR is there a better solution ? Freenas ? But i have heard this is not great as a VM

all ideas welcome.

korgtronix · 24 Aug 2015 at 09:42

I think if you want something you can lift the drives out of that is also an easy OS to handle NAS wise then Open Media Vault might be good. Its essentially just debian with a web front end so all of the drives can be formatted to standard Linuxy filesystems

nickcardwell · 24 Aug 2015 at 14:00

unraid with plex/dlna?

Uhtred · 24 Aug 2015 at 15:06

freenas is indeed not great as a VM. I used it for a couple of years but then went physical and got much better disk performance from the same hardware.

guildmage · 24 Aug 2015 at 16:42

I know you mentioned you want VM, but I am not sure why you need a VM in this setup. You could still use HP N54l:
* Load a small drive into CDROM bay as your system drive for Ubuntu server
* Load 4 drives into caddys and combine them into MDADM Raid 5
* Install Plex
* .. and well you're good to go.

You can add local backup onto a USB drive or offsite backup as FTP or crashplan or something like this and you're sorted.

Using MDADM raid you can easily recover data, but just make sure you will not have more than 1 faulty drive at a time.. and obviously keep on top of your backups regardless of status of your raid array.

ASE001 · 25 Aug 2015 at 11:35

I use NAS4FREE as a VM, works great. the uPNP server is a bit dated but there are articles on the Web that explain how to install PLEX server. Never done it, so I’m not sure how complicated it is?

What I did do is to pass through my physical drives to the NAS4FREE VM, direct connection. I have 4 * 2TB drives setup with a 32Gbyte SSD cache drive as a ZFS RAID, I have not enabled dedup since it needs a lot of memory and CPU horse power. (Not all motherboards support HDD pass-through, I use a AMD FM2 with an A88 chipset which supports hardware pass-through)

If you use iSCSI and need iSCSI-3 persistent volumes then NAS4FREE editions I have tried do not support it, although I am at least 12 months behind the latest release. iSCSI-3 persistent volumes are required for Microsoft clustering.

BlizzardX · 25 Aug 2015 at 12:03

Randall8686 said:
So im looking to thin down the hardware in my "games Room" as its getting rather full. I was to take out a synology and a N54L as they are not really needed any more. However i will need a nas solution for sharing files with friends and family and also supplying DLNA media around the house. So i want to run somthing on my Xeon based server, ideally i dont want anything too CPU hungry and well ram it can have what it needs. So what do you all use/feel is the best toption for a "VM" ? I have run Xpenology as a VM on my N54L but worried about the loosing data thing as its all stored in its funky SHR raid config. is there a safe way of running the xpenology software where i can recover data if it all goes T1ts up. also should i raid the drives or let the xpenology do its own raid ?

OR is there a better solution ? Freenas ? But i have heard this is not great as a VM

all ideas welcome.

I would stay with Xpenology / DSM, best NAS software I've used. With respect to SHR, it is simply Linux LVM2 over MDADM managed raid; all software based. In fact, Synology have the way to mount the drives in a Linux distro to access the data if something happens to the DSM partitions... I've had to do this myself and can say it works fine, allowed me to copy all my data off the drives.

My xpenology build uses 12 bay hotswaps and has been running flawlessly since updating; obviously can use the backup software within DSM to update to the cloud if you wish...

EDIT: here you go, this is the link - Mount Synology Hybrid Raid from Linux Distro

Randall8686 · 25 Aug 2015 at 22:23

Interesting, so do i need to set the drives up as virtual drives to the whole volume for dsm? Or not use virtual drives ? Just trying to work out the best config for dsm, looking at all the other suggestions too. Some really interesting options out there. I just want to ensure the data will not get lost. I dont care about 90% of the data but photos etc i want to be really safe. I do have an offsite backup on a single disk but still want this to be as safe as possible

BlizzardX · 26 Aug 2015 at 00:22

Nope, just use the xpenology boot ide file for esxi, passthrough your drives either fully or as rdm if you can. DSM will boot from the IDE image file and then install itself on the drives, with each drive getting a copy of the dsm os and the swap file (MD0 and MD1). You can then use each drive in what ever manner you choose.

Personally, I like SHR as I can expand out the drives as necessary, mostly will not exceed the transfer capacity of a single drive (even games via my network are ok, but would prefer SSDs for latency)... either way visit www.xpenology.com and have a look at the latest bootloader thread.