Add Synology NAS to Proxmox with NFS

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 to Proxmox with NFS mount share.

On this POST you can also check out the same process but with using CIFS/SMB protocol to add Synology NAS to Proxmox.

Activate NFS on Synology

In order to add Synology NAS to Proxmox with NFS, the NFS service needs to be activated first in the Synology itself, since NFS is disabled by default. First, launch the control panel, from there navigate to the shared services. The NFS option is located in the first tab “SMB/AMP/NFS”. You can locate the NFS service right on the bottom in the first tab. Just check the service and click apply in order to activate it.

Create NFS shared folder

Next step that is required is to create a new shared folder and to set user permissions on it with the NFS rule set 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.

Once that is done, navigate to the NFS permission tab and in there we need set NFS rules. The rules we need to set is which client device, network(IP range) or a domain range can gain access to the Synology via NFS service. For this example, in this client field we will define an internal LAN network and add a network subnet(IP range) so that if our devices/machines get a new IP address from the router, they can still communicate with the Synology. Also what we need to specify is the read and write rules for NFS.

See picture as an example:

After the configuration is added, click apply, ok and close the windows. That should be it for the Synology setup, now we move on to the Proxmox.

Add Synology NAS to Proxmox with NFS mount

Now that we have created an NFS 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 NFS option.

New windows prompts in where we need to add information about the NFS 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 to Proxmox with NFS. In other words, Synology offers the NFS network share protocol and In Synology we created the NFS shared folder then we added an NFS 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.

Thank you for your time…