 Tom here from Warren systems and let's talk about Synology virtual machine manager. That's not something I use much in production We just don't really have as many companies out there using it But I know a lot of people in their home labs are using it I have several staff members that use it to run some Linux VMs And I threw a couple windows VMs on her to do some testing and we've been randomly unplugging the Synology and having some Fun with it and so far it has worked really really well and has not fallen apart at all on us I thought it's worth mentioning and a few people have asked me questions about it So let's talk about it real quick now This is the Synology RS 1221 plus that I reviewed just a few days ago I'll leave a link to that review and it's running a Ryzen V 1500b now we added four more gigs of memory than they shipped it to us with In the demo that sounds you provided because we wanted to run these virtual machines and well running a virtual machine with Windows and only four gigs for the entire system wasn't quite adequate. We wanted at least under four gigs in there Now the nice thing about the virtual machine system is it's baked in and it's free But and I just say but just so we can get this out of the way really quick Synology VMM the basic machine that comes with it versus Synology VMM Pro It's a few different options you get here So you get cluster management you get QoS settings you get CPU over commit physical CPUs times two physical CPUs times four with the pro and then it goes down to say things like live migration and high availability which does require three or more nodes and Live migration all need to be purchased via license and it's a not perpetual license It is a one-year VMM three-node subscription 149 on B&H right here That's the price as of today March 9th. It may be different here in the future March 9th, 2021 But I at least want to give people an idea. They have a three-node subscription They also offer a I believe seven node subscription Which this is the price as of March 9th, 2021 for the seven node subscription fee All right Now let's get back over to how it works how it functions And it's actually relatively easy to set up so we can go here and click on virtual machines There is a pause because I have two Synologies tied together in here. I'm currently just running on the demo license It gives you a 30-day trial for the pro version of the license And I just want to you know test out some of the features such as the live migration and Yeah, all that works perfectly fine unless you're using two different processors Then yes, that doesn't work quite as fine But you can shut down the vm and move it between servers If you like to import a vm we can look at that first It does standard ova files and does support some disk images I didn't really do much testing with disk images, but ova files are common because open virtualization Architectures have become somewhat common So you can find a lot of things already built in an ova file And that's really convenient that they have an import for that Once you have these machines up and running or if you'd like to create one Their wizard is relatively simple to do as well. We can build a microsoft one Which does help you with these Synology guest tools They have a cd you can download and attach to the virtual machine and load all the drivers You can do this in linux and linux these linux whether it's debbie and ubuntu fedora Seem to have no problem when I set up some of the servers on here No issues with the drivers or anything special I had to do with there You also can load a Synology virtual dsm And then you have an option for others that just kind of provides a generic template For loading whatever operating system you'd like to set up on here As far as once they're up and running run running host is called albert This running host is called rs 1221 plus this is the one we're on It actually lets you control the virtual machines from both once you've tied Two synologies together with the virtual machine. You just say hey, what's the other one running it? It asks you you tie them together and now you control both virtual machine setups from one or the other It does this symmetrically. So if I go to the other machine, I can control them on this one and vice versa Pretty straightforward though how it works You get your usual functions of shutdown for shutdown restart or suspend And I like when you connect because it's got the vnc viewer, which I've seen quite a few times and here we go Here is the vnc viewer and I have the ip address pulled up in here because it does have a virtual network Manager that supports doing vlands. So if we look here and we go to action edit This is a running virtual machine. It's the one i'm connected to over here And we want to go over to the network one thing about this network So if we change it back over to this vlan here, and I'll go to the network manager in a second It does switch it But windows it does not actually unplug and plug it back in so windows doesn't think to do anything and we actually have to do a release Renew and now we'll get a new ip address There we go. Now it's on the different network if you switch networks It's something of note if the machine is running when you do this Because it's not sending a signal that it unplugged and replugged in the network interface You will end up with it You know not necessarily asking for a new address and you just have to renew it or you know reboot it and that fixes it too Now when you ask for high availability You want to enable ha at least three hosts are needed in a cluster required in order to enable ha if you're not familiar with Why look up split brain computing? It has a little bit to do with that. All right back to the topic Now here is the cluster where you can connect the other systems in here If you want to add it just goes through a pretty straightforward wizard Uh add local area network add via its ip address and you just point it towards the other synology and give the credentials And it adds another server. Like I said, this is symmetric. You can do on both of them As for storage storage is pretty straightforward to set up on here and manage Like any other storage manage through the storage manager on here So you can set up the volumes set up the places you'd like these to run Obviously running on ssd was going to be more ideal But if you need more space spinning rust drives work fine as well This is the network manager, which does have a warning because I think I have some things that are disconnected in here But here's how you set up the vlan's for example, and we can edit one just to get an idea Give it a name Throw this in here. Uh one three three seven is the vlan tag for this vlan and then figure out which Plugs it wants so on this host it's plugged into land one I'm not even using the other network interfaces and then this host It's on land five. I believe the one that has the error probably has too many boxes checked. Yep. It's got all the Extra ones checked that don't need to be because I have nothing plugged into them right now. So that should There we go. Now. It's a healthy network As far as adding and creating them pretty straightforward It does offer the option of external or private and if you don't choose a vlan It's just going to attach to the native network that you put it on images You can download the Synology guest tools right here and I have a DSM image downloaded It's kind of neat that when you're setting up virtual machines, you can use Synology DSM as an option So you can have DSM virtually running inside of a DSM Novel feature if you have a use case for that It also does have the option to Add DSM files from a local So if you want to try running different versions of DSM or pull it from another system I thought that was kind of neat that it has that ability Protection it does have options for protection plans whether you want to local snapshot or local snapshot with remote replication So much like Synology, it's all integrated to their backup plan So you can replicate this to another system back to what I said about having The vm pro license to be able to do that when you have more than one Synology because it's replicating to other Synologies if you just want to back up the files or back up things that's different You can choose different targets or use hyper backup to back the system up But as far as like their protection plans and replication Just note that that's part of the pro setting when you have two Synologies as a destination Under the settings we do have like cluster notification and high availability and some detection in terms of interval And that way you got to figure out what works for you with the high availability It can start the servers on another server if one of them fails or something goes down But then you have to also tune it a little bit to make sure it fails in terms of the way you want And not just when you're unplugging something be careful whenever you have high availability Because sometimes it's a network hard failure if these devices lose communication Can trigger an event of starting up the server somewhere else which can cause some problems just just a little note there Logging full logging and everything else so you can determine You know the virtual switch was successfully updated or changed your modifications and all the other logging Functions and facilities in here, but overall I think it's a nice system I think it works quite well and is another example of how Synology does a great job of packing a lot of functionality with a relatively easy to use interface on there Um, the one thing I really haven't tried but a few people have mentioned to me is about running firewalls inside there for testing It's not something I've put any time in Um, I'm not sure leave some comments down below if you say that works really well I've had a few people say they got it working. Some people said they didn't I did notice that specifically they announced Linux support and they say window support. They don't specifically say free bsd So I have not tested it like, you know, how well free bsd works in there But I've said this many times on the channel I'm not a big fan of virtualizing firewalls unless there's a really solid use case for it because it adds a layer of complexity It's not that you shouldn't do it. You should just do it knowing there's going to be a lot more complexity And potential issues you may have to troubleshoot when you do decide to virtualize the firewall But either way go ahead and check out. This is just a free service with Synology unless you want the pro features Which does have that license with an annual subscription and thanks And thank you for making it to the end of this video If you enjoyed this content, please give it a thumbs up If you like to see more content from this channel, hit the subscribe button and the bell icon To hire a share project head over to laurancesystems.com and click on the hires button right at the top To help this channel out in other ways, there's a join button here for youtube and a patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated For deals discounts and offers check out our affiliate links in the descriptions of all of our videos Including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of shirts and new designs come out well randomly So check back frequently And finally our forums forums.laurancesystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics covered on this channel Thank you again, and we look forward to hearing from you. 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