Enable Nfs Vaai on a Synology X10

I was really trilled when Synology announced also releasing DSM 5.1 for their x10 series. Why? This because DSM 5.1 has a great feature called NFS for VAAI. In simple words, hardware acceleration on your NAS. For everyone using a Synology with at least DSM 5.1 or later and have VMware vSphere connected to it, I really would recommend enabling this feature. How you can do this, is explained below. First check your vSphere storage configuration, without VAAI you will see, that hardware acceleration is not supported.

Now first download the VAAI plugin, cause VMware needs to know how it can offload the storage tasks to the Synology NAS. The plugin can be found here. When the download is finished, save the file somewhere on the NAS where VMware can also access it, for me it is a folder named __Management under the NFS share.

Connect to your vSphere host using SSH, make sure you have enabled SSH. (host - configuration - security profile, enabled & start SSH) When you are logged in, you can install the plugin with the following command.

esxcli software vib install -d /vmfs/volumes/Gimli\ \\(1\\)/\_\_Management/Updates/SYN-ESX-5.5.0-NasVAAIPlugin-1.0-offline\_bundle-2092790.zip

Wait a few seconds, it can take a few minutes, if everything went fine, you should see the following message.

Installation Result
   Message: The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective.
   Reboot Required: true
   VIBs Installed: Synology\_bootbank\_esx-nfsplugin_1.0-1
   VIBs Removed:
   VIBs Skipped:

You can reboot the system from here, simply with the command “reboot” or from the client. After the reboot the configuration page should say hardware acceleration: supported.