Install Synology NFS VAAI Plug-in for VMware

Synology

In the recent DSM update (5.1), Synology added VMware VAAI support for NFS volumes using two primitives which are Full File Clone and Reserve Space. What do these VAAI primitives offer?

  • Full File Clone enables virtual disks to be cloned by the NAS albeit while the machine is powered off.
  • Reserve Space allows you can create a thick VMDK file. However Reserve Space does not off-load the work to the array. The benefit of thick VMDKs is that many use eager-zero for high I/O performance needs.

On the Synology side of things you just need to update to DSM 5.1, but in order to take advantage of VAAI you still need to install the VIB plugin on your ESXi 5.5 hosts.

Installing Synology NFS VAAI Plug-in

There are two ways to install the Synology NFS VAAI plug-in, command line and via VMware Update Manager and I’ll include steps below for both starting with command line.

Command line:

  1. Download the Synology NFS Plugin online bundle (mirror) and upload it to a datastore that’s seen by your hosts (in my case I uploaded it to my “Data” datastore).
  2. Next SSH into your ESXi host and run the following command:
    esxcli software vib install –v /vmfs/volumes/Data/esx-nfsplugin.vib

    Be sure to replace the datastore name with the name of your own datastore.

  3. Finally reboot the ESXi host.

synology nfs vaai vib install

After the reboot you can verify that the Synology NFS VAAI VIB has been installed by typing the following in the command line:

esxcli software vib list | more

synology nfs vaai vib installed

VMware Update Manager:

Be sure to download the Synology NFS Plugin offline bundle (mirror), this is different from the online bundle as mentioned in the Command Line install.

  1. Open vSphere and go to Update Manager and then the “Patch Repository” tab and click on “Import Patches
  2. Next browse to the location of the Synology VAAI offline bundle zip file and import the patch.
  3. After the patch has been imported, click on “Add to baseline…” to add the plugin to an existing baseline. Or you can create a new baseline just for this plugin under the “Baselines and Groups” tab and clicking “Create”
  4. Finally, Remediate each of your hosts connected to the Synology NAS

synology vaai vum

Synology VAAI NFS Supported

Once you’ve installed the Synology NFS VAAI plugin on your hosts, either via command line or VUM, your Synology datastores “Hardware Acceleration” should go from looking like this:

VAAI before

To now each Synology NFS volume “Hardware Acceleration” being listed as Supported like so:

VAAI after

Similar Posts

  • Use Pi-Hole to block ads on all devices in your network

    Sure ad blockers have been around for a long while now, but those are typically only available for your web browsers and not ever device allows you to install them such as cell phones, media players, smart TV’s, etc. I came across a neat project that allows you to block web ads on every device in your network, called Pi-Hole.

    In a nutshell Pi-Hole was developed to run on a Raspberry Pi, but will run on most any Debian based distro, and will act as a DNS server to which you point your devices or router to use as the DNS server so that all requests are filtered through Pi-Hole. Pi-Hole then blocks 100’s of thousands ad domains. All without having to use a single browser extension and for FREE!

    Read More “Use Pi-Hole to block ads on all devices in your network”

  • How to add Realtek R8168 to ESXi 5.5 Update 2 ISO

    Realtek

    Over the past weekend I was working on a whitebox ESXi host and wanted to upgrade it to ESXi 5.5 Update 2 from an older version of ESXi 5.1 using a realtek R8168 network card. While I could have performed an in place upgrade, such as via command line, a clean install was preferred. However, VMware has removed a number of NIC drivers from ESXi 5.x and trying to install with the base ESXi image would result in a “No Network Adapters” error during install.

    In order to do a clean install you have to re-add the Realtek R8168 NIC drivers back into the ESXi 5.5 image, otherwise a NIC will not be found and thus ESXi will not install. These are the steps to easily re-add the Realtek R8168 drivers into ESXi 5.5 ISO by making a custom ESXi 5.5 image.

    Read More “How to add Realtek R8168 to ESXi 5.5 Update 2 ISO”

  • My VMware ESXi Home Lab Upgrade

    Although the focus in my career right now is certainly more cloud focused in Amazon Web Services and Azure, I still use my home lab a lot.

    For the last 5+ years my home lab had consisted of using 3x Intel NUC’s (i5 DC53427HYE), a Synology NAS for shared storage and an HP ProCurve switch. This setup served me well for most of those years. It has allowed me to get many of the certifications I have, progress in my career and have fun as well.

    At the start of this year I decided it was time to give the home lab an overhaul. At first I looked at the newest generation of Intel NUC’s but really wasn’t looking forward to dropping over $1,300 on just partial compute (I’d still need to be RAM for each of the 3 NUC’s). I also wanted something that just worked, no more fooling around with network adapter drivers or doing this tweak or that tweak.

    I also no longer needed to be concerned about something that had a tiny footprint. I also questioned if I really needed multiple physical ESXi hosts. My home lab isn’t running anything mission critical and if I really wanted I could always build additional nested VMware ESXi hosts on one powerful machine if I needed.

    So in the end, the below is what I settled on. Replacing all of my compute, most of my networking and adding more storage!

    Read More “My VMware ESXi Home Lab Upgrade”

  • How to setup NFS on Synology NAS for VMware ESXi lab

    Synology

    I’ve been asked several times how and why I setup my home lab to use NFS on my Synology NAS and thought a post detailing the steps would be best. First the why, when I purchased my Synology DS412+ about two years I recall seeing several people stating NFS was out performing iSCSI (like this post) on the Synology. It was strictly from reading other peoples findings that I started with NFS and have continued to use NFS without any issue. In fact I’ve been very happy with my DS412+ in a RAID 10 setup.

    How I setup NFS on the Synology for my ESXi homelab is pretty simple as well.

    Read More “How to setup NFS on Synology NAS for VMware ESXi lab”

  • How to manually delete NetApp SnapMirror snapshots

    The other day, one of our volumes in the lab environment filled up. This volume has a couple large VM’s on it, coupled with a couple different Veeam backup jobs running using the native Veeam backup methods as well as using NetApp snap mirror to snapshot the volume and then using Veeam to ship it out to Azure.

    At any rate the volume filled up to the point where vCenter wasn’t allowing me to migrate VM’s off the datastore. I really didn’t want to expand the volume just so I could move VM’s off of it.

    Instead, I decided to delete some of the older proof of concept snapshots from SnapMirror. Below are the quick and easy steps to clear up some un-used snapshots and free up some space on the datastore.

    Read More “How to manually delete NetApp SnapMirror snapshots”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

4 Comments

  1. Hey MIke. Does this still work? I tried to find the download but it doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Do you know where I can get the offline bundle file?

    1. Nm I think I found it. Thanks! If this works, I have found the perfect machine for VMware Lab and some pretty good midrange gaming!