Upgrading RAM on Synology DS920+

[Enquiries]

Hello! Big fan here; been following your YouTube channel for a couple of years since I bought my Synology 920+ when it came out, and watch a lot of the videos you post there.

I am currently using the 920+ for both home and business, and I would like to migrate the Virtual Machine, where I run my company's ERP server, onto the NAS. I tried importing the ova and running it in the Synology Virtual Machine Manager, but it consumed all memory available (4GB) and essentially froze the box.

Understanding that my available options to upgrade the hardware are essentially RAM and NVME Cache, I have a couple of questions:

1. Regarding the RAM, I have decided to go with a 16GB SODIMM. Should I go with Dual Rank or Single Rank memory? What is better for my use case? From what I read online, single rank produces less heat and may improve performance marginally. But I don't know if for my use case it just doesn't matter?

2. Will I see a marked performance improvement if I add NVME cache? Only when reading/writing a lot of small files?

What is your opinion?

Thank you!

[TribalHound]

If you are running ANY virtual machines on a NAS you should ensure that you setup a 'reserved memory' for the system.
If your Synology was previously running with 4GB RAM and you add a VM - that's going to be a massive hit on the available resources.

I would advise increasing the RAM by the requirement of the VM and reserving that 4GB for the system itself. So if you're going to 16GB that sets a limit on your VM of 12.
The biggest performance gain you can achieve for VMs is to make sure your VM HDD and network are using the VirtIO drivers
https://www.instructables.com/Windows-10...ology-NAS/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNvEaBGc...cessrandom (I know this is QNAP - but it's a brilliantly clear how to)

You will see a marked improvement using NVME Cache (make sure you get some additional cooling capability), but you could also use those NVME as a Raid 1 Storage Pool for your VMs, so further enhancing the VM performance, but only if you're happy with the NAS current performance. For VM Processor settings, using passthrough gives the best performance.

When running VMs on a NAS, I've found it's best to keep the VM to it's smallest capacity requirement and then mapping any storage to a network share on the NAS. It means you can upgrade / swap VMs much more efficiently too, without having to worry about data retention on the VM.

Hope this helps.