Hi,

Are you intending to write to the storage as NFS or SMB? As those are the typical modes where that setting will matter.

I’d like to steer you instead to one of the alternates:

iSCSI will allow you to use multipathing without any faffing about with Link aggregation as iSCSI will communicate across multiple NICs as individual target endpoints. Your benefits to this are that if you’re using a Linux server with the XFS file system or Windows Server 2016+ with ReFS you can leverage fast clone for much smaller synthetic fulls that will complete much faster.

Another option if your QNAP has enough performance and some SSD available is to use QuObjects and target the storage as S3 compatible (assuming your license supports this, are you on community edition for a “full” version?) and you can then use object storage with immutability support (https://www.veeam.com/sys459 for Veeam’s supportability statement)

In any scenario be sure to leverage the multiple NICs on your QNAP as a way to isolate the management services of your QNAP. All the security in the world will be pointless if someone can get admin access to your QNAP and tell it to format its disks.

I'm open to iSCSI. I'm planning on using iSCSI as the datastore for my 3 2016 guests on an exsi hosts. 

We had Veeam running at one point (lost all our data.... brutal). Backup storage was setup as a volume and live data was on a LUN. Then I resigned and have returned to someone mullet install and need to redo it all because nothing is iSCSI anymore. If I should be doing iSCSI for live vm storage AND Veeam backups, that's cool with me. This is just the kind of advice I'm looking for, Paul. Thanks.

My other concern is the Cisco switch interfaces (already setup for lacp). Can a cisco lacp port group handle all the flavours or does that lock me into using 802.3ad?

Sorry to hear about your data loss, being honest & transparent with you that’s always my concern with QNAP/Synology devices and other industry equivalents, they’re software RAID and I’ve found more data loss events with them compared to DAS servers and SANs.

As for the 802.3ad question, if only one side is attempting to use LACP then theoretically your Cisco switches shouldn’t be able to identify matching ethernet links, but if the switch is in active mode then it might attempt to do this anyway. Regardless Cisco shuts down improperly configured LACP links so if you do have 802.3ad configured on the ports that you want to use for iSCSI, I would suggest removing this configuration as you don’t want the switch to detect an incompatible configuration and drop your traffic path when you’re writing backup data...

Thanks so much for the advice! 

When you said, “Leverage NICS” do you mean dedicated 1 NIC for Management VLAN and the rest for my iSCSI? That’s how I imagined it. 

One problem I’m dealing with is the previous guy put the Domain, Exsi and QNAPs all in the same VLAN. I spend so much time trying to plan for a huge redo. There’s just so much misleading information inside all the equipment I almost can’t believe my eyes.

Hi @deepseadata -

I just wanted to follow up on your post here and see if you had any further questions. It appears Michael may have answered your question? If so, we ask you select whichever comment helped you out as ‘Best Answer’ so others who come across your post with a similar query may benefit. 

If you do have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Thank you.