From the Field: Synology DiskStation DS1621+
Earlier this year the team at Synology reached out to me asking if I would be interested in using their DiskStation DS1621+ and posting my thoughts and reviewing the device. Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to have a NAS like this in their home lab!? Come with me and let me tell you more about this device and share some details of how I set it up in my environment, including a walk-through of the DSM 7.0 software at the heart of the system.
The Synology DS1621+ is a 6-bay NAS solution designed to store and protect a large array of data and assets. Now more than ever, data keeps growing and growing. The need for high-performance, secure and stable methods of storing, accessing, and collaborating with this data are paramount. The DS1621+ gives you the power to start small but scale fluidly as your data needs grow.
I didn’t capture a full unboxing but the system was ready in less than 15 minutes. I followed the quick start hardware guide to install the hard drives, connect the network, power cables, and boot up. Easy-peasy! You will see in the screens below that I started with a 2 HDD configuration and would later receive 2 more drives from Synology. Global supply chain issues created a snafu with getting all 4 drives together.
Out of the box and plugged into the network the unit will grab an available DHCP address. Later in the configuration, you can select IPs for each network adapter and, if you want, bond them into a multi-nic trunk for redundant and improved speeds. The bonded trunk also takes an IP address so set aside 5 free IP addresses.
Once the main page loads click ‘Set up’
Install the DiskStation Manager DSM
The installation will prompt/remind you that the disks you are about to use need to be initialized and formatted, thus wiping any data you may have. As this was a brand new setup I wasn’t worried but make sure you have any data backed up if you are repurposing existing disks
Installation takes about 10 minutes before you can access the DSM 7.x console to continue setup.
After a refresh of the browser you are prompted to get started
Give your new Synology DS1621+ a name and set up the administrator account and password. You have the freedom to select what account name you use here which I think is a very nice feature so you aren’t stuck with a common administrator name that can be easily guessed and attacked.
Chose how you want your updates. It’s recommended to automatically install updates and I’ve had no issues with this on each of my Synology NAS units.
If you already have a Synology account you will sign in here for a number of great benefits like SSO, Support management, and 24/7 monitoring of your NAS with email and text alerting if issues arise. Best of all these services are ‘Free’
There is an additional service called ‘QuickConnec ID’ that leverages a URL that you chose, giving you external access to your Synology DS1621+ from anywhere you have access to a browser.
What good is a NAS without storage? Let’s jump into configuring Storage Pools and Volumes. During initial setup, you are prompted to create Pools and Volumes.
Click the ‘Create Now’ button and then ‘Start’ to kick off the wizard
Next, you are prompted to choose a RAID type, the default and recommended by the Synology setup is SHR (Synology Hybrid Raid). You can read about this in the link provided. I selected this as I have done with previous Synology units and it’s worked great for the 4-6 disk arrays I currently use. However, if other RAID options are your preference you can definitely select your preferred option and continue
Select some or all of the available drives, click next and configure the size of the volume. You can choose some or all of the space. This is useful if you intend to create multiple volumes from the maximum storage available.
Select either BTRFS or EXT4 file systems. BTRFS is the Synology recommendation, supporting many great features native to the Synology DS1621+
Clicking next you can see that your new Volume is healthy and ready to go
Once these selections are made during the setup wizard you will be taken to the console main page to get into more configuration steps to get your Synology DS1621+ operatonal
Open the Control Panel, and choose Network. Here you can edit your name, default gateway, DNS and setup a proxy server.
Selecting Network Interface you can create a bond using the 4 network interfaces you connected. This ‘Bond’ will need an additional IP address and will act as a VIP (virtual IP) to load balance traffic across the 4 network links. It’s worth noting that there is a dual 10Gbe add-on card available if you are running a faster storage network in your environment
Chose you link aggregation mode, ‘Adaptive Load Balancing’ is selected by default and works great in my lab
Next, you can select all of some of the physical NIC’s on the Synology DS1621+ and then either let DHCP assign the IP address to the Bond or, as I did, manually configure all of the IP address settings
In addition to the more common network settings you can configure 2FA and SSO under Security/Account settings
Next up if you are a VMware home-labber or if you are going to deploy a Synology DS1621+ into an office or production environment you can go to the main page and select SAN Manager to create LUNs that can be attached to your vSphere environment. Here you can see my current NAS with 1 LUN that I have attached to my vSphere environment
Click iSCSI and create. The name is customizable and if you want CHAP authentication select it here
As this is a new LUN chose to ‘Create a new LUN’
Again names are flexible so give your LUN a good name, select the Volume that contains the storage and choose thin or thick space allocation
Confirm all of your settings, click next
And Voila, you have your iSCSI LUN and target to present to VMware
I hope this walkthrough of the Synology DS1621+ was helpful.
Check out the Synology Web site for the latest news on their lineup of storage devices. Below are a few quick links that helped me out and I hope will be useful in your journey.
Synology DS1621+ this is the unit that I currently have deployed in my home office/lab
Synology SHR Raid this is the Synology custom-built RAID offering for all of its devices
Synology DiskStation Manager 7.0 this is the software at the heart of the Synology line-up of NAS devices
Please drop a comment below and let me know what you think, what questions you may have.
Until next time, thanks for stopping by. vJoeG signing off!
