QNAP Rolls Out ‘Virtualization Station’, Allowing Native VM Support on its NASes

QNAP has just rolled out what it’s calling “Virtualization Station”. Hoping to extend its product’s functionality, the company has now made it possible to run multiple VMs on a single Turbo NAS. By using a “simple and centralized management interface”, users now have a single window into the health of their VMs, as well as access to do all the care and feeding that might be necessary.

Supported guest Operating Systems are Windows, UNIX and Linux. While a user’s use case will be different from the next, QNAP’s Product Manager Alfred Li states that “Implementing a virtualization platform on a NAS greatly extends applications and benefits for both business and personal use including reducing physical server maintenance, managing applications via web browsers, building a web server, and flexibly installing multiple operating systems.” He then goes on to state that “with the Virtualization Station, users can carry out more operations on a single NAS and complete tasks more efficiently, enjoy high performance for I/O-intensive data access, and secure backup management at the same time.”

Adding to the basic idea of running virtual machines on your QNAP Turbo NAS, functionality such as snapshotting, import/export, QoS and user permissions have been baked into the Virtualization Station offering from the start. For more powerful devices, VDI deployments can be made on the Turbo NAS as well.

Virtualization Station is available now in the App Center for these models: TS-ECx80 Pro, TS-ECx80U-RP, TS-ECx79U-RP, TS-x79U-RP, TS-ECx79U-SAS-RP, SS-ECx79U-SAS-RP, TS-x51, and TS/SS-x53 Pro series. Coming at a later date, Virtualization Station will be available for the TS-x53 Pro/SS-x53 Turbo NASes, as well.

You can expect to see our look at Virtualization Station in the near-future.