Synology DSM6.0 VLAN support

March 30, 2016December 30, 2019 19 Comments 6

I’ve noticed some distress on the web because, with the release of Synology DSM version 6.0, it is no longer possible to use the vconfig command. This command was used to configure VLAN tagging on your interfaces.

It is however still perfectly possible to create multiple sub-interfaces on a physical interface or bond without using the vconfig command. All you need to do is create additional config-files for each of you sub-interfaces. Each sub-interface represents a VLAN ID. The config-files are found in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/.

Note: shell access is required to your Synology. So you should enable SSH for instance.

In the example below, you will see my Synology has a bond using eth0 and eth1. My setup required to have some additional VLAN tagged sub-interfaces on top of my physical bond interface.

As you can see, I have a sub-interface for VLAN 100, 120, 130 and 20. You only need to copy a config-file using the naming format ifcfg-<phy int>.<vlan-id>, and adjust it to your needs. A (copied) config-file looks like this:

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Stretched cluster VM & datastore affinity

March 21, 2016December 30, 2019 Leave a comment 7

When using a vSphere stretched cluster solution, it is important to have your VM(s) and its VMDK(s) affinity aligned in the same datacenter. So if the storage controller in datacenter 1 serves the read/write copy of the datastore, you would like the VM to run on a vSphere host in the same datacenter. This will avoid the storage read IO’s to traverse the inter-datacenter connections, resulting in an obvious impact on performance. With the VM – datastore affinity in place, you will also mitigate the risk of potential VM outage if a datacenter partition (aka split-brain scenario) will occur.

Let me show you what I mean by using a simple logical overview of a stretched cluster infrastructure. The following example is based on an uniform storage backend. More information on uniform and non-uniform metro storage solutions is read here.

What you don’t want:

What you do want:

It is perfectly possible to automate the alignment upon… VM creation for example. Needless to say, you will require DRS to run. Preferably in fully automated mode.

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vSphere and NFV tuning considerations

March 11, 2016December 30, 2019 Leave a comment 11

In my current role, I am involved in a lot of discussions around network functions virtualization, a.k.a. NFV. Talking about NFV in this post, I mean telco applications. By that I mean applications specifically designed for and used by Communications Service Providers (CSPs) as core applications to, for instance, enable your (mobile) phone to actually be able to call another phone. 🙂

NFV with regards to telco applications is not that mainstream so it seems. The old school native way, having telco specific hardware running line cards, payload servers, etc., obviously is not sustainable looking at the current way we like to do ICT. On the other hand, it looks like telco application vendors are still finding their way on how to properly adopt virtualization as a technology. So it looks like the level of virtualization adoption for network functions is a few years back in comparison to IT application server virtualization.

But development is rapid, and so it is for NFV. There already is a NFV Architecture Framework created by ETSI. ETSI was selected in November 2012 to be the home of the Industry Specification Group for NFV. The framework is a high-level functional architecture and design philosophy for virtualized network functions and the underlying virtualization infrastructure as shown in the following diagram:

Although there are words that NFV is mostly deployed using a KVM hypervisor working closely with OpenStack as the API framework for NFV, VMware is looking to hook into the needs of the communications service providers to properly ‘do’ NFV using VMware solutions. Hence the vCloud for NFV suite.

VMware vCloud NFV is a Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) services delivery, operations and management platform, developed for Communications Service Providers (CSPs) who want to reduce infrastructure CapEx and OpEx costs, improve operational agility and monetize new services with rapid time to market.

Let’s have a closer look at tuning considerations for vSphere to properly run NFV workloads!
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