Installing a NAS in your home lab is a great way to up your game at home. There are a lot of options available these days ranging from a few hundred dollars like the Synology DS216 2 bay NAS, to the massive DS2415+. If you have multiple hosts in your lab, then you’re almost out of excuses for not having a NAS. I recently picked up a DS1815+ to use as an iSCSI target for my vSphere lab as well as a home NAS and I couldn’t be happier. The performance on this unit is good and I have access to features normally found in an enterprise environment. Additionally, configuring iSCSI between the NAS and my ESXi hosts was a breeze. Here’s how I did it.

Configure the Synology NAS

• Log in to your Synology NAS and open Storage Manager.
• Select iSCSI Target from the left-hand menu.

 

• Click Create.

 

• Give the target a name like VMware.
• Click Next.

 

• We’ll ignore CHAP (Challenge-Handshake Authentication Protocol) for the time being since this is just a home lab setup.
• Click Next.

• If there aren’t any iSCSI LUN’s created yet, we can create one here.

 

• You can choose to create a file-level LUN or a block-level LUN. For more information on the different types of LUNs click here. Make your selection and give the LUN a name.
• Click Next.

 

• Choose an existing disk group or create a new one.
• Click Next.

 

• Size your LUN according to your needs. You can always expand it later.
• Click Next.

 

• Review the details and click Apply.

 

• If you’re going to be presenting the LUN to multiple hosts, then select the newly created iSCSI Target and click Edit.

 

• Click on Advanced.
• Check “Allow multiple sessions from one or more iSCSI initiators.”
• Click OK.

Your Synology NAS is now configured as an iSCSI target. Let’s move on to setting up our ESXi hosts.

Configure your ESXi Hosts

• Log in to your vSphere Web Client.
• Select a host and click on the manage tab.
• Click on Storage.
• Select Storage Adapters.
• Click on the Green Plus sign to add a new adapter.

 

• Select Software iSCSI adapter unless your hardware supports iSCSI offload.

 

• Click OK.

 

• Select the new iSCSI adapter, click Targets and Dynamic Discovery.
• Verify the ESXi host has discovered the Synology iSCSI Target.

• If your Synology iSCSI target isn’t discovered automatically, just click on Static Discovery and add it manually.

 

• Click on Storage Devices and rescan storage. Scan for new Storage Devices and VMFS Volumes.
• Click the refresh storage information button.

 

• Now we can see the iSCSI volume!

 

• Repeat these steps for any other ESXi hosts.
• Right click an ESXi host or cluster and create a new Datastore.

 

• Click Next.

 

• Select VMFS.
• Click Next.

• Name the Datastore.
• Select a host.
• Select the Synology volume.
• Click Next.

 

• Use the full capacity of the LUN.
• Click Next.

 

• Review your configuration and click Finish.

 

• And with that, we’re ready to start using our Datastore and Migrating VM’s there.