As I have a lot of holiday photos, I had to change all disks for more disk space. Below old configuration :

• 4 x Western Digital RE4 500Go
• RAID 5
• Total amount of storage : 1,3To

When I have created this volume, Synology disks groups did not exist. So my volume was not flexible. Moreover I have used my Synology NAS for Hyper-V needs. I had create some file-based LUN which provides flexibility but them bring poor performance.

So recently I have bought four new Western Digital RED 2To. I have deleted the old volume (before I have saved all my holiday photos J) and I have created a volume. Below my requirements :

• Volume must be faster as possible in read and ESPECIALLY in write => RAID 10
• Disk group must accept block-level LUN without take all volume space => Multiple LUN on RAID
• I need WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor :p) volume to share my holiday photos on every multimedia equipment => Volume

Synology side configuration

So lets go to configure my Synology DS412+. The disks group configuration is in Storage Manager. I click create, I select all disks and I choose RAID 10 redondancy :

Once disks group is created, I make a volume for my holiday photos shares with 2,61Tb space. Just click on Create in Volume tab, type your volume size and apply configuration.

Now, for my virtualization need, I go to the iSCSI LUN tab to create as many LUN I need.

Click on Create in iSCSI LUN tab, select iSCSI LUN (block-level) – Multiple LUNs on RAID. Type a LUN name and configure iSCSI target as needed. Define a storage size and click to create. Repeat the procedure for each LUN needed.

Hyper-V host side configuration

Once you have created your LUN, go on your Hypervisor server. For this example, I work on Windows Server 2012R2 Datacenter where Hyper-V role is installed.

So I open iSCSI initiator in Administrative tools on Hyper-V host and I launch a quick connect on Jupiter target (this target is the name of my Synology). Click on connect and select all LUN. Now all LUN are in disk management of your Windows.

Now you can use these LUN to store VHDX or to make pass-trough disk for your databases for example.

Even if I have only four disks, performance is not ridiculous. I reached the 200MB / s in write and IO meter in resource monitor of my Synology indicate good performance for my lab needs. Sometime the data transfer is faster than my network bandwidth. I think this is ODX which is working. It’s great because I use Virtual Machine Manager 2012R2 and it is able to use ODX for VHDX transfer.

Synology NAS for Hyper-V is a good option

To conclude, Synology provides some SAN features such as iSCSI, LUN or ODX. For a LAB, it’s useful for shared disks and CSV (Cluster Share Volume) disk for Cluster Failover.

In the same time, WAF volume is available to share holiday photos across network to smartphone, TV etc.

Synology disks group provides flexibility to manage its volumes. I think it is a great feature for power user or small enterprise. So next time I braze a fibre channel adapter on my DS412+ … nooooo it’s a joke (but let me think about that … :p)

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