Brimming with VM goodness: Qnap TS-453mini 4-bay NAS

Diminutive do-it-all Celeron storehouse

Virtual virtuosity

Fancy using a NAS as a virtual desktop? It might be a rather bizarre notion but Qnap has satisfied it with its Virtualisation Station, a powerful but easy to use Virtual Machine management app. It enables the TS-453mini to manage multiple applications with a different OS at the same time. Virtualisation Station supports Windows, Linux, Unix and Android.

Choose your VM template with handy preconfigured RAM and storage allocations

After installing the app via the App Center in QTS, it’s just a matter of setting up the default folder to hold the VMs and selecting the default network. You can decide on which template to apply from a choice of six: micro; mini; small; medium; large; and extra large. All use different amounts of memory and disk capacity. You then install the VM using an ISO image via the VM Management page.

Virtal machine overview showing Windows 7 and 8.1 instals. Click for a larger image

To do this I used the rather excellent Zalman ZM-VE300 (now updated to the VE350), an external 2.5in hard drive enclosure that has firmware built into it that allows ISOs to be copied directly to it and load directly from it. No more carrying around loads of optical media holding OSes.

Monitoring Windows 8.1 (left) and Windows 8.1 virtual machines from the desktop. Click for a larger image

Virtualisation Station also has a feature called Snapshot, which allows recording of the VM at any point in time. So, should the VM fail, you can quickly roll back to when the system was running smoothly.

Another useful app to install is QvPC. With this software you can use the TS-453mini as a PC just by plugging in a mouse, keyboard and monitor (into the HDMI port) and should the network die, you can carry on accessing the VM console or accessing all the data on the NAS via a local version of the QTS OS.