Answers to vSphere Home Lab Questions on Synology DSM 4.1 [Video]

by Chris Wahl on Nov 28th, 2012 | 2,461 views

There’s a general theme to the questions that I receive about my Synology home lab NAS boxes. Mostly, they focus around how I use them for hosting virtual machines on vSphere, especially for those looking to construct a home lab to better prepare themselves for various certifications or practical, hands on experience. In this video, I attempt to further explain some of the answers to common Synology DSM questions as they relate to version 4.1. Additionally, I cover a few of my favorite features in DSM 4.1 and go a bit deeper into the configuration of my DS2411+ with all SSDs.

Looking for details on VCP, VCAP, or VCDX? You can take a look at the various new VMware certifications in my “VMware’s New Gauntlet of Certifications” post.

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4 Comments →

Forbes Guthrie permalink - Nov 28th, 2012

Hi Chris,
I think the Synology units are great home lab units. I just wish they would allow trunking on their network interfaces so we could split traffic onto multiple VLANs. They support VLAN tagging, just not trunking. Would seem a straightforward thing to add.
Forbes

Reply
- Chris Wahl permalink - Nov 29th, 2012
  
  Interesting proposal. So perhaps one VLAN for iSCSI and another for NFS? I could get behind such an idea.
  
  Reply
  - Mike Brown permalink - Nov 29th, 2012
    
    That’s how we do it here. NFS and guest-initiated iSCSI traffic leave the hosts over teamed 10Gb links on different VLANs and arrive at the filer over two teamed 10Gb links, on their respective VLANs, of course. If you’re using multiple protocols and don’t have the physical ports to break them out while, then trunking is the way to go.
    
    Cheers,
    
    Mike
    
    http://VirtuallyMikeBrown.com
    https://twitter.com/#!/VirtuallyMikeB
    http://LinkedIn.com/in/michaelbbrown
  - Forbes Guthrie permalink - Nov 29th, 2012
    
    Yep, but I’d be more interested in splitting off the management traffic if possible. However the ability to create IPs on different VLANs to test multipathing options would be nice.
    Oh, and I’d love to see Samba 4 packaged up as one of their apps so we can create an AD DC