While looking for some app packages for my TS-469 I was curious to read the ‘virtualization station’ blurb on the newly styled QNAP website. It seems to be selling QNAPs as virtual appliances – from where you can run virtual machines without needing any additional hardware.
I’ve not tried it yet, it seems to run a custom (and free) form of QEMU as opposed to VirtualBox or Hyper-V – so it’s a hosted and not bare metal solution. But what really got me thinking was HOW MANY virtual machines can you run on this little box. There are 2 massively limiting factors that make a mockery of this virtual appliance claim.
- First is that the TS-X51’s comes with a measly 2GB RAM, but more critically can support a MAXIMUM of 4 or 8GB(!)
- Second the CPU is an Intel Atom 2.13GHz dual-core and so s-l-o-w
For reference I currently use a couple of HP N54Ls as trashable virtualisation stations, they are fully fledged micro servers and currently can support max 16GB of RAM (see my previous post on the RAM confusion) these run on AMD Turion II Neo dual-core CPUs which are actually up to the task and work better than the Intel Atom! I can have Exchange and SharePoint 2013 running very nicely on a single box, with dedicated Domain Controller and a SQL server!
So the QNAP fails, as you cannot upgrade any of the critical components. Only good for messing with basic VMs in my opinion. It’s expensive too, not sure what market it is targeted at. Home users will not be interested in virtualising any OS (seriously they won’t), this is just too expensive for small business who are better off getting a real virtualisation solution. Where is the resiliency, does QEMU have the equivalent of vmotion. How difficult is it to snapshot, revert or backup? What are you thinking QNAP? Stick to what you do best (although by all accounts you are currently doing a poor job at that).