Add Synology NAS on Proxmox using CIFS/SMB

Overview

Proxmox offers multiple features and tools to expand and add storage, such as NFS and CIFS network shares. These are great options not for just storage expansion but these are great options to add backup locations as well. Since Synology also supports these storage protocols, this article will cover the steps how to add Synology NAS on Proxmox using CIFS (in other words, we’ll be creating the Proxmox SMB share and adding Synology ).

The process with NFS protocol is covered as well and can be checked out on this POST.

Configure CIFS/Samba on Synology

In order to add Synology NAS to Proxmox with CIFS, the CIFS service needs to be configured in the Synology itself and enabled(in order to be accessed using the Samba protocol). The service is activated by default. We just need to first adjust the SMB versions to make sure that Synology can match the SMB version with the client(Proxmox). Launch the control panel, from there navigate to the file services. The CIFS option is located in the first tab “SMB/AMP/NFS”. You can locate the CIFS service right on top in the first tab(Under the SMB). After you confirmed that the SMB service is enable, next click on the advanced settings in order to access the SMB configuration.

Here in the SMB configuration just set the minimum and the maximum SMB protocol versions. Minimum to be at SMB1 and maximum at SMB3. The rest can be left at default and click on apply. And with this, we have SMB active on our Synology.

Create a Samba shared folder

Next step that is required is to create a new shared folder(or use an existing one) and to set user permissions on it in order to be accessible via network. Also from the control panel navigate to the Shared folder menu. Once you open it, it will automatically start a folder creation wizard. For now, just add a folder name and finish the wizard.

Once created, Synology will automatically open the edit shared folder menu. In here we need to define the configuration settings for shared folder.
User permissions tab will be opened first by default. Here we need to specify a user with read and write access in order to access the folder.

Add Synology NAS on Proxmox using CIFS/Samba

Now that we have created a shared folder on our Synology, we need to add it in Proxmox. To do that, we first need to go to our “Datacenter” settings and from there to the “storage” menu. Click on the button Create and choose the SMB/CIFS option.

New windows prompts in where we need to add information about the CIFS/SMB share we created earlier. The first information it asks for, the ID, provide a name of the share and you can name it as you want. Next is the server(IP address of our Synology) and exposure(exposure is the mount path to the shared folder). Follow the example from the picture.

Once that is inputted, click on OK and the share should show up immediately.

The end result should look like this:

Summary

To summarize what we covered in the article - Here we went through the steps how to add Synology NAS on Proxmox using CIFS/SMB. In other words, Synology offers the CIFS/SMB network share protocol and In Synology we created a shared folder, set access on the folder and then we added an CIFS/SMB shared storage from Synology NAS to the Proxmox using the Proxmox in built tools, in order to increase the storage for our VMs and ISO images.

With this method, we increased the storage size of our Proxmox node which we can use to store VMs, containers or backups.

Thank you for your time…