How To Run VMs on a Synology NAS [Building Virtual Machines]

hey how you doing my name is emilio and thank you so much for tuning in to this video today we are going to be talking about the synology nas specifically how you can run a virtual machine that's right you heard it correct a virtual machine or a virtual server or even a desktop version directly on your synology nas right yes you can actually use your synology nas to run a windows or some other sort of operating system directly on it it is absolutely brilliant we're going to be talking about that today please subscribe clicking on that subscription button and the bell so that you don't miss out on anything so let's get on to that video right now [Music] all right so i've got myself a synology nas it's a fairly new synology now that has recently been released you may be running a synology nas and it could be an older one that may still be okay but make sure that you do have the operating system updated the actual software update as latest as possible because if you start watching this video and you find that you cannot configure or set up the virtual software on your synology nas it could be because your synology nas is not compatible so you'll have to check that out first because what we're going to be doing is we're going to be going onto our synology nas we're going to be opening up the store where you go and get applications the app store essentially and we're going to be installing some virtual software onto our synology now so if that is unavailable or you have trouble installing it or running it it could be because of the version anyway that's a bit of an introduction let's now log in to our synology nas we're going to be connecting from my computer logging into the synology nas logging in as an administrator and then going through those steps so we're logged in here is our synology nas now i'm running a newer synology nas but early versions should do the trick as well as long as you're running a newer version of the os and we're going to look at how to get a virtual machine running now of course you need to know how to log into your synology nas first get those admin credentials log in and here we are now of course the other thing you want to do is you want to have enough capacity on your synology nas to be able to actually install the the operating system that you want to install and you need to have a fairly fast synology nas that way your your vm that you're going to be installing is not going to be running too poor because when we are configuring the vm you have to allocate some cpu and ram and hard drive space to that particular vm which is going to then be shared with the resources that are on your synology nas so if you've got a slower synology nas if you're running out of space then that's going to directly affect the actual running of your vm so get something that's pretty well but you can use this just for testing so maybe you can actually lower the specs of your vm first and then see how it goes and if it runs great excellent but then you can also later on increase those resources just by powering the vm off and then just pump up some of those resources and then try it again and see how that goes so uh we're logged in right here now the first thing we need to do is we need to go into the package center which is this area right here and we need to install some software now your sort you may be familiar with this but package center is essentially where you go and get yourself all of your apps for your synology nas and we're going to search for virtual so just type in virtual into here and press enter and you see that this particular icon shows up this is the app virtual machine manager okay so this is the app that we are going to install you can see a bit more information about what it does and what its purpose is so this is the app that we're going to use it's actually a synology application so it's native to the synology brand of products which makes it very very easy and make sure that compatibility is where it needs to be as well so let's go ahead and install that that may take just a little bit of time and then once it's installed we can then go and start configuring our vm now the great thing about the synology nas is you can install vms across the range so if you've got linux if you've got windows you can actually go and install the the vm of that particular version now what you will need to do is you need to get yourself the installation file or the iso file for that vm so if you're going to install linux you're going to get maybe centos or ubuntu or red hat or something like that or kali linux if you're on windows you want to install windows 10 or one of the server editions you're going to need to get the iso file for those files first so you need to go and download those off the internet um the linux side is generally going to be for free except for certain versions and windows it may be for free if you've already purchased it otherwise you'll need to buy yourself that version but you need that iso file a bootable iso file to be able to install the operating system without that you can't really proceed further so that has uh now installed okay so you'll see that under my main menu it's actually listed now in here virtual machine manager so we can go and open that up and here we are presented with just our wizard okay so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to select next here it's going to ask me check if the host settings are suitable for running virtual machines so it's going to give you a bit of a status here essentially around your um whether your nas can actually run a host virtual machine or not okay so in my case these first two are enabled and these next two are eligible if you have an issue with one of these it doesn't mean that it won't run if it says it's not eligible or it's disabled you can turn those on and you just have to sort of check essentially what they are and what the impact may be but in my case we're all good so we can select next now it's going to ask me what volume do you want to install this on now of course the whole purpose of the nas is that you have a whole bunch of disks you select those disks you create a volume out of those disks so in my case i've just got the one volume if you want to have more of a dedicated space perhaps create a separate dedicated volume for your storage of your vm so this is where do you want the vms to live to be stored so i'm going to select my primary volume right there ensuring that i've got sufficient capacity so i've got plenty of capacity to be able to do what i need to do next and from here we are now going to be presented with once it does open up it's obviously taking a little bit of time to load there so it is actually creating the necessary um settings on that volume where it looks looks good there finish here is my nas it's called aguero synology my cpu percentage right now so how much is currently being used how much ram i've got available and used and how is my lan performing so my up upload and my download speeds on my network okay virtual machines currently i don't have any and of course storage we've just got the one volume that we just allocated previously okay now of course we need to go and create a virtual machine now but just be a little bit aware around some of the areas here on the left let's just grab this and drag it down so you can see a little bit better so on the left side you've got an overview you've got virtual machines you've got your clusters you've got storage you've got network and you can go and configure a whole bunch of stuff in here network if you've got multiple ports on your synology nas that is great and i would actually go and enable those network points and run cables into your synology now have them all active because the more ports you've got the better load balancing you've got of your vms if you've got multiple vms they're not all using the network traffic of one network point that can be shared across the other ones the other good thing is things such as failover and redundancy so if one network point fails your vm doesn't fail it can just sort of bump over and start using another network point another network connection so if you do have more than one you can go and do that in my case you'll see i've got one host and i've got two network interfaces which is fine we're not going to go into too much detail but here is the two that i've got and they're both currently plugged in and both working so i do already have that set up for me virtual machines it's blank because there's nothing in there yet here is my storage you can go and create and add more storage if you so choose to cluster we don't have anything really set up other than our standard by default cluster that's created and then virtual machine so let's go ahead and create a virtual virtual machine right here we're going to select create and we're now going to be asked what sort of operating system is this is this a microsoft windows is this a linux is this something different so in our case we're going to build a windows 10 vm so we're going to select microsoft windows and select next and just making sure that it's going to select it on this storage so this is the storage that we're going to be installing it onto so we're leaving that as the default and say next what do you want to call the vm okay so you need to give the vm a specific name a name that is relevant so i'm going to actually call this vm this is a win server i'm going to call it win10 server test okay so i'm just using this for testing purposes but of course you give your um your windows 10 vm a relevant name that is relevant for you or whatever vm that you may be building how many cpus do you want to be able to allocate to that vm so one two three or four remember this is now going to be using a chunk of the cpu from your synology nas so i think four is probably a bit too much for windows 10 so i'm just going to select two and how much ram do you want to allocate to it okay so i've got an option of one two three or four gig um if i had more ram available on my synology notes i could allocate more okay so i'm just going to leave that as two gig of ram of memory again reminding you that you can go and actually increase this later on if you so choose to here is our video card that we're going to be using we're going to just leave that as the default video card next virtual disk now of course your windows 10 has got ac drive any server that you build whether that be linux or windows 10 or even on a mac computer has some sort of a disk drive your primary hard drive and this is asking you how big do you want that to be okay so how big and of course that'll take a chunk from that volume that we allocated which had in my case had terabytes but how much do you want your your vm to actually see so i'm going to give it just a standard of 80 gig so an 80 gig c drive hard drive and you can go and change that later on if you choose to next what is the network we're just leaving it as the default vm network we can just have it to be not connected for now so we're just going to leave that as the default and next okay now this is the guest agent okay so this is uh for drivers of windows virtual machines so by default of course the synology doesn't understand the microsoft the windows operating system so it's asking you to go and download this particular piece of software to actually ensure that there's proper compatibility between those two environments when you're taking snapshots of running virtual machines and other things like that as well so we're going to select download it's going to go out to the internet and download that particular guest tool software for my windows virtual machine it's done and then you'll see it's actually listed right here additional iso file this is the file that was just downloaded now here the very first step is the iso file for boot up so now this is where you point this particular instance that we're creating to the iso that you have downloaded so you have to go and find that iso now what i'd recommend of course if you've downloaded this onto your pc onto your mac whatever computer that you're using to connect to your synology uh you need to upload that onto the synology preferably go in so so go and upload it use the file station which is right up here okay you can open up your file station and actually upload the file so go and upload the file to your synology nas to a location that is relevant for you and then you go and navigate to it okay so i'm going to go and select browse i've got all of my stuff under data applications and then i've got a folder called microsoft and i've got windows 10 right there and the particular version that i'm going to be using is this one right here and i'm going to select that so now i've got my windows 10 iso selected auto start i'm going to say to yes because i do want it to start automatically you can set it to no but i like as soon as i boot up let's make it start automatically the bios do you want a legacy or uefi so this is really depending on the operating system that you're going to be installing the iso itself so we're going to leave that as the bios because bios is what's generally used with microsoft and the the rest will just leave as the defaults okay we're not going to change anything there so let's select next now assigning permissions so who do you want to have permissions to be able to on and off we're going to say admin and apply so in my case i had it left as powered off so now it's ready to go um you'll see there's a few you know it's highlighted it says powered off and there's a few you know a bit of information on the bottom showing me what this is doing the virtual disk the network that it's going to be using so now we're going to go and select power on now in the drop down option of course you've got a few different options you've got power on you've got shut down you've got four shutdown you've got restart suspend resume now that is now preparing okay and you'll see that things now start to spin up now this area right here is to actually connect and bring up a window where you can see what's going on so we're going to select connect you see it's opened up a separate tab and here is my windows logo so this is a good sign if this has been seen if you're seeing this it means that it has found the iso and it has booted the iso and now windows 10 the actual installation or the actual setup is actually now beginning now if this didn't work for you perhaps it's saying that the disk is not found or please insert or the iso is corrupted it's because perhaps the iso that you have got is not valid it's corrupted or perhaps it's not a bootable iso so your iso has to be bootable essentially you know the same way that you would plug it into a usb stick into a computer should be able to boot from that so we're just going to let this run through and start up looks good everything has now loaded and now we just are presented with the standard windows installation screen so now we go through the standard steps of selecting the language the time the currency and now the installation begins so it's going to do a standard setup so we'll let this run through now your computer would have one of the actual vm itself would have rebooted a couple times now if it did get stuck on anyway i have seen where sometimes it can get stuck when it's rebooting here's a couple things that i would do um back in here you could actually shut down the vm completely just get it turned off and under the edit area right here under others get that iso file for boot up unmounted then okay and then boot it up again and if it does happen again just give it another restart and it should be fine it should be presented with this screen right here and then you can continue your installation we are logged in excellent all done and of course you don't have to just use windows 10 you can use other versions of windows you could even use linux and install ubuntu centos other versions of linux right on here but of course remembering to be limit that you're limited by the actual capacity of your nas so you've either got it running or you're going to be running it in the future once you finish this video but running a virtual machine on the synology nas it is absolutely brilliant and you know what the great thing about this is that you don't need to go get yourself another computer you don't have to get yourself a spare computer or buy another computer to run another operating system you can run it straight onto your synology nas right out of the box as long as you're running the right version of synology nas the right software and that you've got an appropriate iso file for the installation of your operating system thanks again for spending the time i really really appreciate it please like comment subscribing to my channel so that you don't miss any of my video releases and please do also check out some of my other videos around the synology and other sort of technology so that you can stay up to date with what's happening in it

Channel: Tech With Emilio

Views: 52,884

Keywords: How to run Virtual Machines on a Synology NAS, synology virtual machine, synology virtual machine manager, virtual machine manager synology, synology nas virtual machine, run vm on synology, synology virtual machine windows, virtualization on synology, virtual machine on a synology nas, ubuntu on synology, How to Install Ubuntu on a Synology NAS, how to put a vm on a nas, linux vm nas, synology vm, ubuntu on synology nas, virtual manager synology, emilio aguero

Id: spC8aFCpHDU

Length: 16min 50sec (1010 seconds)

Published: Sun May 09 2021