NAS Units as VM Hosts: QNAP’s Virtualization Station Explored

Virtualization has been around since the 1960s, but it has emerged as a hot topic over the last decade or so. Despite the rising popularity, its applications have been mostly restricted to enterprise use. Hardware-assisted virtualization features (AMD-V, VT-x and VT-d, for example) have been slowly making their way into the lower end x86 parts, thereby enabling low-cost virtualization platforms. QNAP is, to our knowledge, the only NAS vendor to offer a virtualization platform (using the Virtualization Station package for QTS) with some of their units. Read on to find out how it works and the impact it has on regular performance.