QNAP firmware Updates and Virtual Machines use Caution

One of my clients QNAP devices was largely out of date running version 3.2 something, I really wanted to get them onto 4.0 so I could get some nice Rsync and NAS to NAS backups happening. The QNAP runs as an NFS share with 2 VM's and vmdk files located on it and its connected directly to the ESXi server.

I started by shutting down all the VM's, then proceeded to update the QNAP to version 4.0. Update was successful and all looked well in the world of QNAP, however, something had happened where now I could not access the share via windows explorer for example before I could access \\192.168.0.199\VMStorage directly and see the vmdk files,  but now it was prompting for a username and a password.

Why do you need a password now?

The firmware update had brought with it some additional security settings which had caused the direct referencing of the share not to show the files anymore and it broke the connection with my datastore on my ESXi server. I was using the 'everyone' user in order to access the VMStorage. To fix this I had to create a new user on the QNAP and re-map the datastore on the ESXi server. Then I could boot my VM's no problems.

So if you are running a QNAP with several VM's on it with no security on the area where your VM's are stored then I would be cautious when updating the QNAP firmware. The best thing would be to have security on your VMStorage folder when you first set it up as QNAP is going to require you to do this when you upgrade.