Enabling NFS VAAI Support in Synology 5.1

Synology enabled VAAI support for NFS in version 5.1 of their DSM software. In order to take advantage of this technology from ESXi hosts we need to do two things:

• Upgrade DSM to at least version 5.1-5004 (2014/11/06)
• Install the Synology NFS Plug-in for VMware VAAI

DSM

DSM can be upgraded from within the Control Panel application. Head to the Update & Restore section, check for and install updates. This will likely require a reboot so ensure anything or anyone using it is shutdown or notified.

 

ESXi

Prior to installing the NFS plugin my two NFS datastores don’t have the Hardware Acceleration support.

 

From the 5.1-5004 Release Notes:

VMware VAAI NAS Added NFS support for two primitives: Full File Clone and Reserve Space. Please note that you should install the Synology NFS Plug-in for VMware VAAI and read the instructions in README.txt to make sure installation is successful.

Once the plugin has been downloaded it is possible to use either VMware Update Manager or esxcli to install the vib. For the purposes of my home lab without Update Manager I’m going to show you the esxcli way.

Upload the vib to a datastore all hosts can access, then the command to install the vib is:

esxcli software vib install -v /path to vib/esx-nfsplugin.vib

Once installed, the ESXi host will require a reboot

After the reboot you can check all was successful by running:

esxcli software vib list | grep nfs

and examining the NFS datastores