If storing your Virtual Machine on a Qnap NAS through iSCSI was not good enough for you, here is news. You can now Run a virtual machine inside select Qnap NAS models. You need decent processor and memory to be able to run a VM , so it’s only natural that Virtualization station is only offered with high end models running on Xeon processors. They are going to brand these NASes as vNAS.
Why a VM on NAS ?
The most compelling reason to have a VM running on a NAS for me is to have access to a program online. Rather than downloading a whole office file for example , then running it and putting it back on the server, I can access a copy of windows running on vNAS, run the program there, edit my file and close the session.
Another reason could be the support for Legacy applications that are not too resource hungry.
Performance of vNAS
Your VM is going to be running on a NAS with 16GB RAM, so don’t expect it to perform at top notch. However I was surprised to see that system was still able to handle 3 OS running at the same time – Ubunut, Windows 7 and windows 8, with enough power to get 2-3 more VMs running. Offcourse the actual performance would depend on the number of programs/processes running, but it’s good to see that you can load 3 major OS basic framework and not see any dent on performance.
You can allocate more memory and there are many other options to tweak your VM.
Accessing your VM
You can conveniently access your VM in a browser.
I don’t expect people to be running their mission critical applications on VMs inside Qnap, but it’s a great feature for supporting legacy applications, offering staff quick access to certain file formats that can be edited online and for testing purposes.