I am in the middle of changing/mod/convert Qnap NAS project and I wish to share what I have learn so far.
Background Info:
Qnap Inventory
TS/TVS x70 was previous flagship model and its a very powerful platform but a bit pricey. It comes with three type of cpu. Celeron G550 (no pro version), i3 3220t (pro version) and i5 3570t (tvs version). The motherboard support DDR3 so-dimm to 16GB. In order to make it a vSphere esxi 6.0 host, I need to upgrade its cpu to i5 or better then i7-3770t to have vt-x & vt-d function + aes acceleration. Compare all the cpu. Upgrade the RAM to 16 gb and get the Qnap second NIC card (special type of bracket, low profile wont fit) This tutorial has the how-to
Booting Qnap from different disk is easy, all you have to do is change the BIOS boot order. I did a vsphere 6.0 install on usb 3.0 flash disk (sandisk ultrafit 64 gb) and found all my needed hardware is capable and successfully for passthrough
My Video/Audio/Sata Controller & Nic call can be passthrough.
Background Info:
Qnap NAS was the prefer choice of my company's choice of NAS for many sales office location (5~15 people) and with a small tweak on the samba + ldap, it serve as PDC, and install the Openfire via some qpkg tweaks and it can serve as a xmpp server which satisfy all of the small office need. However, Qnap has slowed their development and their latest QTS 4.1 or coming QTS 4.2 is really a face makeover. The virtualization/indexing file function actually lack behind what is on the market and and their snapshot method is not as good as a ZFS server (yes, I know ZFS Server and Qnap NAS should not be put on the same category for comparison). QTS has become to restrictive for the business needs and I have decided to covert all existing QNAP Nas either to Ubuntu ZFS server and some of the powerful ones will be converter to VSphere Esxi 6.0 for multi-purpose functionality.
Qnap Inventory
TVS-470 x 1 (manually upgrade the cpu/ram, voided warranty)
TS-470 Pro x 1
TS-469L x 1
TS-459 x 1
TS-251 x 1
TS-259 x 3
TS-239 x 1
TS-470 Pro x 1
TS-469L x 1
TS-459 x 1
TS-251 x 1
TS-259 x 3
TS-239 x 1
TS/TVS x70 was previous flagship model and its a very powerful platform but a bit pricey. It comes with three type of cpu. Celeron G550 (no pro version), i3 3220t (pro version) and i5 3570t (tvs version). The motherboard support DDR3 so-dimm to 16GB. In order to make it a vSphere esxi 6.0 host, I need to upgrade its cpu to i5 or better then i7-3770t to have vt-x & vt-d function + aes acceleration. Compare all the cpu. Upgrade the RAM to 16 gb and get the Qnap second NIC card (special type of bracket, low profile wont fit) This tutorial has the how-to
Booting Qnap from different disk is easy, all you have to do is change the BIOS boot order. I did a vsphere 6.0 install on usb 3.0 flash disk (sandisk ultrafit 64 gb) and found all my needed hardware is capable and successfully for passthrough
My Video/Audio/Sata Controller & Nic call can be passthrough.
- Video/audio passthrough is important, it can also server as a great multimedia center for meeting room running Kodi (formally known as XBMC, qnap slow to update).
- Sata Controller passthrough can make it a wonderful ZFS Server using mirror + stripe pool (no ssd caching, only using for smb office). And maybe I will run GlusterFS on top ZFS, and turn all my qnap machines into openstack storage swift node.
- On the ubuntu 15.04 (openstack kilo ready), I can even install IncrediblePBX serving as IP-PBX and Fax Server (which qnap's asterisk is way to outdated).
- Install Owncloud 8, can replacing all the qnap's ios/android app needs for the end user. (too bad that OpenMediaVault cannot be installed on ubuntu, through it can be done by modify many lines of source code)
- Updating Openfire XMPP server via apt-get is gets much easier.
- Samba + Ldap integration is much easier compare on QNAP where you have to use qpkg method tweaking it.
- 2nd dual port NIC will passthrough to PFSense 2.2 which it will serve as the firewall/router/vpn for the office. The AES acceleration is great, too bad it does not have quickassist support but so far PFSense is yet to support it.
- vSphere on USB Disk without vmfs is really inconvenient, too bad VMWare never allows vmfs on USB flash drive/disk (some did has success on it) even through there are USB 3.0 SSD on the market (kingston & Super Talent both fast and durable), I have decide to use the eSata SSD 32GB from OCZ (hate it but its convenient) eSata is eol and its very hard to find them on the market nowadays, not much of alternatives.
- Maybe 3rd or additional VM can be use as Openstack Nova Nodes, and it really depends how well can vsphere 6.0 integrate with Openstack Kilo
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