Lab Storage Update.

Since starting my new role with Xtravirt my Homelab has gone through a number of fairly significant changes.  At the moment it’s very much focused on the VMware stack and one of the things I needed was some more storage and especially some more storage performance.  With that in mind, I purchased a new Synology a  DS918

It’s a very compact unit with a quad-core Intel Celeron & I have left the Ram at 4 GB for now.

I have added some of the existing SSD’s that I had giving me about 3TB of usable flash.  I am presenting this back to my VMware hosts using NFS 4.1.   I must have missed the announcement as this is now built into the Synology GUI ( It used to be a command-line only option) I have verified the VAAI works as expected in this configuration.  At present I am using this with a single network connection however I will be testing NFS Multipathing shortly.

The performance improvement has been noticeable and I have now removed all non-Synology systems from primary storage.   This has left me with the DS918+ detailed here and a DS216+ with 2TB of Raid1 WD Reds. I am using this for ISO’s and some general file storage.