Adding a second EX4100 Nas

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud EX4
1

Hi all,

I have a EX4100 Nas with 4x4tb in raid 5. I might run out of space soon and I was wondering if it is possible to expand my nas space by adding a second EX4100.

The idea is to have only on access point (e.g. one ip), so I would want to expand the first nas with the space on the second nas. So if I go to access the samba share from the first nas I would see more space.

What is the best way to do this? How to configure the second nas? As iscsi? Will this add to my raid 5 on the first nas? What config should I do in the first nas to add the second?

Thanks

2

Hi bckspc,

Unfortunately, it is not possible to expand the space of your NAS by adding a second EX4100. However, you can create the ISCSI target and that would be mounted on your computer as a drive but that is not going to expand the space of the first NAS.

3

Thanks for you reply. With that in mind I guess it is possible to put the second nas as iscsi and add it to the first nas, creating a new share, correct?

Another question, if I create that second nas with 3 drives as raid 5, if I add a forth drive to the raid would the iscsi expand as well?

Thanks

4

Hi bckspc,

No that is not possible to achieve, You cannot put the second NAS as ISCSI and add it to the first NAS as ISCSI targets volumes are mounted as physical drives on your computer.

Also, you cannot expand the capacity of the existing ISCSI target, you would have to create a new target and mount it on your computer.

5

Hi alex.singh,

How about Volume Virtualization present in the web interface. It states that: “Volume virtualization simplifies scalability by enabling you to map to other iSCSI targets and present them as volumes on your WD My Cloud system.”

Reading this I understood I could have an iSCSI volume some (in this case, my second NAS) and could add it to the list of drives present in the first NAS. Even if I could not add it to the raid I thought I could at least share it using the first NAS IP address with the SMB protocol.

Is this not correct?

6

I got my hands on a second EX4100 disk less so I’ll post my findings here so I can help other users.

First of all, it is possible to map an iscsi drive using volume virtualization and it will show as a new share on the first nas, what I did was:

  1. On the second nas I’ve created an iscsi drive using all the available space there
  2. On the first nas, I went to volume virtualization and added the iscsi drive from the first nas. After some formatting and stuff, I can go into details and choose a samba name for my new drive, did it and it works.
  3. I can now map that samba share using the IP from my first nas when it’s effectively using the second nas storage space.

About iscsi resizing. I guess this indeed is not possible but I need to run some more tests. The second nas is currently converting to raid 5 and rebuilding everything (I’ve added a third drive) so I’ll have to wait. As of now on the web interface, the iscsi target I’ve created dissappeared but I’ll wait until rebuild is finished to make sure.

Still about iscsi resizing I figured that we can at least change the size since the interface allows it but as I said I haven’t tried yet.

I’ll keep you posted.

7

I’ll guess this will be my final post about this subject unless somebody has any questions or needs help on this.

So although is possible through volume virtualization feature to have a share on the first nas pointing to the second nas disk array this will not suit my needs since iscsi does not grow and I will need to grow my second nas eventually (it only has 3 disks at the moment).

I’ve discovered yet another feature on the Network settings that is called “Share Aggregation” and this is exactly what I need. This will basically map any SMB share from other my cloud devices in to the one being configured.

For someone have the same problem as I had here are the basic step:

Scenario: you have 2 Ex4100 devices and you want to list all your shares in the same IP (lets assume is the first nas).

NAS1: configure all your shares for this device and create a user/pass if applicable to access the shared (or use admin user)

NAS2: also configure all your shares for this device and create a user/pass if applicable but this has to be the same user/pass combo than the first NAS (if you use windows, more on that below).

Go to NAS1, Settings tab → Network tab, go to “Share Aggregation”, turn it On. On Root Folder Name just select something like “RemoteNas”, in connect to share just put the IP address of NAS and the shares that you created in NAS2. Click apply.
NOTE: I guess the interface has a bug here and when you click apply the pop-up doesn’t close (although the shares are created). If you click Apply again you get an error saying the Root Folder Name already exists. Anyway, just click Cancel after clicking Apply and it will work.

Now if you go to windows explorer for example and go to NAS1 shares you will see a new share called “Share_Aggregation”, inside there is a folder called “RemoteNas” (assuming thats what you called your root folder name) and inside the shares you configured in share aggregation.

About Windows and same user and pass: The problem with windows is that you cannot access different share folders from the same IP address with different credentials (go figure…). The only way for this to work is to have the same user and pass in all the shares you want that computer to access. I discovered this in the KB of WD, and their solution is to use the same user/pass for all shared or to sign out/sign in from Windows everytime you want to access a share with different credentials (not gonna happen…)

Wrapping up, I managed to have 2 Ex4100 devices configured correctly and accessible via samba via the same ip address.

What a struggle…