Today we’re going to cover a powerful little NAS being used with VMware; the Synology DS923+ VMware vSphere Use case and Configuration.
This little (but powerful) NAS is perfect for your VMware vSphere homelab and numerous other scenarios and uses. Let’s go over this specific use case, and how to best configure it with your VMware environment so you can fully take advantage of it.
Keep in mind that this post reviews only one of many potential uses, specifically with VMware vSphere (and ESXi). I’m hoping with time to review some other uses for this NAS.
The Synology DS923+ is a tiny yet powerful 4-Bay NAS, offering 2x1Gb NICs built-in, with the ability to add in a user-installable 10Gb NIC module. You can also add 2 x NVME drives for NVME SSD cache, giving you the perfect iSCSI target, in our case particularly for VMware vSphere and ESXi.
The highlights of this specific unit and configuration:
Looking at the networking capabilities, we have 3 NICs when the optional 10Gb NIC is installed. This gives us a number of different potential configurations, but for VMware vSphere, we’ll map out the following:
Note: You could add VLAN interfaces to your Synology device on the 10Gig interface, and use VLANs to provide SMB and other services over the 10Gig link as well. Please note that adding VLAN interfaces is unsupported and may cause issues (including when performing upgrades).
What’s particularly nice about this NAS is that for the price point you’re able to provide 10Gb iSCSI to your ESXi hosts, while also having a fallback connection for redundancy. While the fallback NIC is limited to 1Gig which is substantially slower, it does allow your workload to continue to run, and most importantly without corruption or loss of data due to an iSCSI paths down situation.
So now that we’ve established the use case for the Synology DS923+, lets go over how to best configure it for your VMware vSphere environment, and get it connected to your ESXi hosts.
There’s a few things to note for the design of the configuration:
To configure iSCSI on your Synology:
Overall, this is a basic iSCSI target configuration, with the only exception is that we are only using select interfaces for iSCSI connections. While we can use both the 10Gb and 1Gb connections, we’ll use the host settings to only use the primary and have the secondary as a fall back.
Note that the networks (and IPs) used above for iSCSI are on a network dedicated to iSCSI. We do not want to use our data networks for storage related traffic. They are separated not only for security, but also because they are using different frame/MTU sizes.
To configure the Synology NAS iSCSI Target on your ESXi hosts:
As always, I recommend doing a “Rescan Storage” after any storage related changes. You may need to restart the host after enabling iSCSI Port binding.
You have now configured your VMware ESXi host(s) to connect to your Synology DS923+ with multiple paths for redundancy while favoring the faster 10Gb connection.
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