Getting Started

Please read the Requirements and Limitations and configure your Synology NAS before setting up Virtual Machine Manager.

Before You Start

Before you start setting up a Virtual Machine Manager cluster, please note the following information and configure your Synology NAS accordingly:

• Determine the number of the hosts in the cluster:

A cluster can contain up to seven hosts. We recommend having an odd number of hosts in a cluster because clusters work according to the majority. To constitute a majority, more than half of the hosts must be online. That is, if more than half of your hosts are offline, all the services and operations in the cluster will be stopped. Also, fault tolerance is not supported on clusters that contain less than two hosts.

Note:

• Clusters with more than one host does not support HDD hibernation.
• Configure network settings for the cluster:

You need a dedicated cluster network for the hosts so that they can communicate with each other. The cluster network is also used for storage traffic if the virtual machine's computing and storage resources reside on two different hosts.

Note:

• We recommend that you separate cluster network and the network for other services by VLAN.
• Refer to this FAQ article about network ports when setting up the network environment of a cluster, and make sure that ICMP can work well between the hosts.
• Configure a static IP for the network interface:

You need to reserve an IP address range for your Synology NAS, and set a static IP address for the network interfaces on each host. Please note that if multiple hosts are in the cluster, you cannot change the settings of the static IP address afterwards.

• Create Btrfs volumes to be used as the storage for virtual machines:

Before you install Virtual Machine Manager, there should be at least one Btrfs volume on each Synology NAS. The volume will be used as the storage where the virtual machines will be stored.

• Set up user/group accounts:

You can enable permissions for local or domain users/groups to manage virtual machines on Virtual Machine Manager. Local accounts can only be used to sign in to a single host, so we highly recommend setting up domain accounts and joining the hosts to a domain server (at Control Panel > Doman/LDAP).

To configure a Virtual Machine Manager cluster:

1. Open Virtual Machine Manager.
2. In the setup wizard, choose a volume where the virtual machines will be stored.
3. Once the configuration is done, you can start creating and running virtual machines.