Synology NAS iSCSI + VMware

Question

I don't know much about this "world", but my intent would be to have my VM storage on the NAS so that I could run those VMs in any computer on the network. Is that possible?

I know how to create an iSCSI and LUN inside Synology DSM but I don't know how to connect to them. I already looked on the Internet and it seemed complicated and I don't really know if that's what I'm looking for.

Can I do this using a VMware Workstation or do I need vSphere/vCenter?

Answer 1

You need to mount the iSCSI on OS-Level, so if you would be using Workstation, you will have to mount the drive in your OS.

I would say typically you would use ESXi/vSphere.

Here is a pretty good documentation about how to do that: https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/DSM/tutorial/Virtualization/How_to_set_up_Synology_NAS_as_VMware_server_datastore

Regards, Sam

Answer 2

Without vSphere / vCenter you have to connect to the iSCSI target using the built-in iSCSI Initiator in Windows. It will then show a new uninitialized disk in "Computer Management" MMC snap-in that you can format and store data on. You'll need to use ESX in order to have your hypervisors actually cluster their data accesses. Only a single host can access an NTFS iSCSI LUN, but many hosts can use a single LUN in ESX.

Even so, when exporting LUNs to ESX via ISCSI you'll need to use the LIO target for real clustering awareness. Synology might not be using that iSCSI target.

If you're using NFS to export storage to ESX, it's fairly plug-and-play. Windows has native NFS support but it is flaky at best (not production ready) though you'll likely be able to get a few workstations to connect to a single export and access the same data without corruption.