The focus of TrueNAS CORE continues to be ensuring storage reliability, stability, and security for existing users. Taking into account its macro lifecycle, TrueNAS CORE is now entering a sustaining engineering phase within the TrueNAS project. It is not anywhere near its end-of-lifecycle phase. We are just going through a new release cycle for CORE and users can expect to receive maintenance updates for many years still to come.

This BETA version is only recommended for developers and testers. TrueNAS CORE 13.3 includes the following updates:

• FreeBSD 13.3
• OpenZFS 2.2.3-1
• Samba v4.19
• Updates to SMART, Network UPS Tools (NUT), and other services
• Various security and bug fixes

Much of this new code has also been successfully tested in TrueNAS SCALE Dragonfish, which is breaking all records for adoption rate and Release quality. Please review the Release Notes before using.

The release candidate for the next version of TrueNAS CORE (13.3) is planned for June, followed by its formal release in July 2024. TrueNAS CORE 13.3 will continue to receive bug fixes related to stability and security. These updates will ensure that 13.3 is a reliable platform for both homelab and enterprise customers as well as a staging version for those users who wish to migrate to SCALE at a later date.

When Should You Migrate?

If you are installing a new TrueNAS system, iXsystems recommends that you begin with TrueNAS SCALE. There is more added functionality, vastly broader support for hardware, catalogs of Apps, better performance on most workloads, and an improved Web UI, all of which make managing TrueNAS easier than ever.

Existing TrueNAS 13.0 users who are comfortable with their TrueNAS system can update to TrueNAS 13.3 when they see a need based on the TrueNAS Software Status page. Upgrading from 13.0 to 13.3 will be a simple and direct process and includes storage services, VM, Jails, and Plugins. This BETA version is only recommended for developers and testers.

TrueNAS 13.0 users looking for the new capabilities outlined above can sidegrade to TrueNAS SCALE anytime, preserving data and essential NAS functionality such as SMB, NFS, iSCSI, S3, and VMs. Jails do not have an automated migration path to SCALE, and are also more mature in TrueNAS 13.3 than the Linux Sandboxes in TrueNAS SCALE Dragonfish.

Community Involvement

Thanks to the Community for feedback during the planning phase of TrueNAS CORE 13.3.

The BETA version is where we are keen for users to test systems in non-production environments and provide both positive feedback and bug reports. We expect quality to be higher because of the improved QA process.

In addition to your input, there are many ways TrueNAS users can give back and enrich the experience of others in the Community. Check out how you can make a meaningful contribution and play a part in shaping the future of TrueNAS.

The post TrueNAS CORE 13.3 BETA is now Available appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

We’re going to walk you through the basic requirements to run the TrueNAS CORE storage operating system, creating the installation media, and installing it onto your system.

Minimum Requirements

Here are the basics of what you’ll need to run TrueNAS:

1. 64-bit system: Used solely for TrueNAS CORE. TrueNAS is NOT dual-boot friendly, so make sure you’re only using the system for TrueNAS.
2. Minimum 8 GB of RAM: Use more if you’re installing virtual machines or plugins.
3. Boot device (SSD or HDD): Also known as the boot drive. At least 16 GB of storage capacity is required to serve as the boot device for TrueNAS. An SSD is an ideal choice for longevity; keep in mind that the entire disk will be used for the TrueNAS operating system. USB sticks are no longer recommended, due to the high amount of write tasks on TrueNAS.
4. Storage drives (SSDs or HDDs): At least one hard drive for storage of files, but multiple drives of the same capacity can be easily bundled together to provide redundancy if a drive fails. Western Digital drives are a great choice for data storage, but as with any vendor, make sure to avoid drives using SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) technology in ZFS applications.
5. Ethernet cord: To connect your system to the network, through a router or modem. There is no wireless support in TrueNAS.
6. Blank DVD or USB stick: Required to create the TrueNAS installation media. The TrueNAS ISO image exceeds 700 MB so CDs will not work. Your USB stick should be at least 1 GB. Please note that the installation media is not the same as the boot device.
   To access the latest TrueNAS image: https://www.truenas.com/download-truenas-core/
7. Monitor & keyboard: After the setup is complete and you’ve written down your TrueNAS system’s IP address, the monitor can be disconnected.
8. Computer or laptop & internet browser: To access the GUI and administer your TrueNAS system.

Creating the Installation Media and Operating System Device for TrueNAS

It’s important to understand that TrueNAS needs two devices during the installation process, the install media and the operating system device (boot device). The install media is used to install TrueNAS to the operating system device on a computer.

A USB stick or DVD can be used as the install media. In this tutorial, we will be using an 8 GB USB stick as our install media. The minimum size required is 1 GB.

The TrueNAS CORE operating system device can be an SSD or hard drive. The operating system device must have at least 16 GB of space, but we recommend 32 GB or more for operating system device storage capacity to provide room for logging, operating system environments, and future upgrades. An SSD is recommended to improve overall responsiveness as well as the speed of installing further upgrades.

Note that the entire operating system device will be used for the TrueNAS operating system. The drive cannot be used for sharing data through TrueNAS.

TrueNAS reads and writes to the operating system device, so reliability counts. Using a small SSD or hard drive will provide the best longevity. Due to the high write tasks in TrueNAS CORE, USB sticks are not very reliable over the long term. With TrueNAS CORE scheduled to receive continued updates for stability and security, choosing a quality, reliable boot device is the first step towards a well-built TrueNAS system.

For this example, we will be using a tool called balenaEtcher also known as Etcher. Scroll down the web page and click on the Download button for Etcher. Download, install, and run Etcher.

Now insert your USB stick into your machine. Verify the drive letter by going to “This PC”.

For this example, we will be using a tool called balenaEtcher also known as Etcher. Scroll down the web page and click on the Download button for Etcher. Download, install, and run Etcher.

Now insert your USB stick into your machine. Verify the drive letter by going to “This PC”.

In the Etcher application, click “Flash from file” and browse to the TrueNAS .iso file that you downloaded earlier. If your USB stick is not already selected, click “Select Target” and choose the drive to use as the install media. Remember, this is the install media, not the operating system device. Now, click “Flash!” It takes a few minutes to write the image to the disk. A “Flash Complete!” message is shown when done.

After the installer file has been written to the install media, you’re ready to install TrueNAS.

Installing TrueNAS

Now that we’ve gone through the basics of what you need to get started, let’s begin the installation of TrueNAS.

Make sure that both the boot device and the TrueNAS installation media are inserted in the machine that you chose to run TrueNAS.

Boot into the BIOS of the system and double-check that your system is set to boot from the device that contains the TrueNAS installation media that you created earlier. After confirming, reboot the system.

The TrueNAS install menu will be displayed. Choose option 1 on the menu to begin the TrueNAS installation. This will load the Console Setup menu. Hit enter to choose the “Install/Upgrade” option.

The next menu asks which drive should be used for TrueNAS. Make sure to select the boot device and not the storage disk. This menu will show the size of the disks to make it easier to determine the boot device, which is generally a smaller size than the storage disks (which will be larger). The one you want will likely be the smallest on the list. Note that the names of your drives will be different.
Press the arrow keys to select a drive, and press the spacebar to designate it as the drive you wish to use.

The boot device cannot be used for anything other than the operating system itself. Press OK, then YES, to proceed.

Next, type in and confirm the password that will be used to login to TrueNAS.

TrueNAS can be booted in either BIOS or UEFI mode. For the purposes of this video, I’ll be choosing BIOS. BIOS works for almost all motherboards and is typically the option to choose for older hardware. Choosing UEFI will require that your motherboard is more modern and UEFI capable.

Once chosen, your installation will begin. Wait for a bit, all those commands popping up on the screen are perfectly normal. It should take a few minutes.

A message will appear saying to reboot and remove the installation media. Choose OK to reboot. Remove the installation media from your system. As the system reboots, double-check the BIOS to make sure the boot order now defaults to the boot device.

Fire up TrueNAS

When the system boots from the boot device, messages will appear as the TrueNAS operating system loads. When it is done loading you will see the “Console setup” menu. At the bottom of this screen, an IP address will be listed.

From a separate computer that is connected to the same network, open a web browser and type in that address. If it instead shows “0.0.0.0”, check if the network cable is plugged in, and that the network has a DHCP server.

The TrueNAS login menu will appear once the bootup is complete. Type in root for the username and the password you created during the installation.
Once you are logged in, you will have access to the TrueNAS web interface which is used to manage your storage disks, configure access to the stored data, and view the status of the system.

Congratulations! You have just installed TrueNAS. Be sure to check out our other tutorials and videos to learn more about configuring and using TrueNAS.
For comprehensive information on configuring TrueNAS, visit docs.truenas.com.

The post How to Set Up and Install TrueNAS CORE appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

TrueNAS has come a long way and has delivered incalculable value to millions of users around the world. After nearly 20 years of evolution since its inception in 2005 as FreeNAS, TrueNAS CORE has proven to be the most reliable and highest-quality platform for traditional primary storage use cases. Users and customers looking for incremental fixes and changes to their stable storage platform enjoy the sustained value and maturity of TrueNAS CORE. Today, we are announcing our plans to release TrueNAS CORE 13.3 in the next few months. (No, you didn’t miss a release; we simply re-numbered the 13.1 release to 13.3 to align with its updated FreeBSD 13.3 operating system!)

At iXsystems, we have worked hard for many years to be the best possible corporate sponsors for open-source projects. Unlike proprietary vendors, our processes and planning are done in the open, and both community members and customers alike play an important role in how TrueNAS continues to evolve.

Both FreeNAS and TrueNAS CORE were originally developed using FreeBSD as their underlying OS. Roughly five years ago, iXsystems began its Linux journey with the introduction of TrueNAS SCALE. This expanded its potential community, broadened and simplified support for the latest hardware, and opened the door to new possibilities for the software.

TrueNAS = CORE + SCALE

It’s only natural that some community members have expressed concerns about the future when there are two versions of their favorite storage platform. However, as TrueNAS continues to grow, we believe that its future is not a zero-sum game. Both TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS SCALE will exist to address the needs of different users.

The focus of TrueNAS CORE continues to be ensuring storage reliability, stability, and security for existing users. Taking into account its macro lifecycle, TrueNAS CORE is now entering a sustaining engineering phase within the TrueNAS project. It is not anywhere near its end-of-lifecycle phase. We are just going through a new release cycle for CORE and users can expect to receive maintenance updates for many years still to come.

TrueNAS SCALE is the software edition where new features and updated components are actively developed and tested. This is natural because the bulk of the open source innovation we rely on is created and supported on Linux first. Therefore, developing a version of TrueNAS on Linux enables us to more rapidly deliver a more feature-rich, stable, and easier-to-use storage product for users and customers alike. This includes the ability for TrueNAS to run on a much wider variety of hardware and configurations. Of course, high-priority security and bug fixes are all good candidates to be backported to TrueNAS CORE, and  TrueNAS CORE users will always have the ability to “sidegrade” to SCALE if and when they’re ready.

For TrueNAS Enterprise customers, you will always be fully supported for the duration of your support contract regardless of the software version you’re using. TrueNAS 23.10 already ships by default on some Enterprise products, like the TrueNAS F-Series. If your organization is considering a sidegrade to the SCALE-based software now or in the future, as many customers already have, please contact iXsystems Support so that we can assist you in the decision-making and upgrade process.

TrueNAS CORE 13.3 is Coming Soon

The release candidate for the next version of TrueNAS CORE (13.3) is planned for May, followed by its formal release in June 2024. TrueNAS CORE 13.3 will include the following updates:

• FreeBSD 13.3
• OpenZFS 2.2.3
• Samba v4.19
• Updates to SMART, Network UPS Tools (NUT), and other services
• Various security and bug fixes

TrueNAS CORE 13.3 will continue to receive bug fixes related to stability and security. These updates will ensure that 13.3 is a reliable platform for both homelab and enterprise customers as well as a staging version for those users who wish to migrate to SCALE at a later date.

TrueNAS and FreeBSD Continue

With our 25+ year history in open-source software, we share an uncommon affinity for FreeBSD among all of those in the community who love TrueNAS. After all, FreeBSD is a major part of our company’s heritage, iXsystems having spawned from BSDi in the 90’s.

The TrueNAS development and engineering team continues to provide contributions upstream to FreeBSD and remains committed to the bootstrapped, open-source development philosophy on which it was founded.

Kris Moore, SVP of Engineering at iXsystems, shares his thoughts with other die-hard fans in this Community Forums post:

“TrueNAS CORE hasn’t been deprecated, and [13.3] is planned to start making a showing in Q2. It will be based upon FreeBSD 13.3 and will provide a way to keep running jails and upstream packages for some time to come. It is still a rock-solid NAS and we’re expecting to support it for a long while for that use-case.” 

Our love for FreeBSD is only eclipsed by our commitment to keep pace with the demands of our customers and users to continue innovating in ways that help them find success with TrueNAS. TrueNAS CORE will provide a rock-solid foundation for users that need fast, reliable, and scalable storage. TrueNAS SCALE provides the same rock-solid foundation, but also supports those users that want to extend their storage into a converged solution with Apps and VMs. CORE users that do not need Apps and VMs may find that SCALE offers better performance and stability, more flexible hardware support, and a more intuitive UI with a wider breadth of storage-focused features.

When Should I Migrate?

If you are installing a new TrueNAS system, iXsystems recommends that you begin with TrueNAS SCALE. There is more added functionality, vastly broader support for hardware, catalogs of Apps, better performance on most workloads, and an improved Web UI, all of which make managing TrueNAS easier than ever.

Existing TrueNAS 13.0 users who are comfortable with their TrueNAS system can update to TrueNAS 13.3 when they see a need based on the TrueNAS Software Status page. Upgrading from 13.0 to 13.3 will be a simple and direct process.

TrueNAS 13.0 users looking for the new capabilities outlined above can sidegrade to TrueNAS SCALE at any time, preserving data and essential NAS functionality such as SMB, NFS, iSCSI, and VMs – with the primary exception being Jails.

The upcoming SCALE 24.04 “Dragonfish” will, however, include early support for Sandboxes, which provide jail-like capabilities using systemd nspawn containers. Manual migration of workloads will still be required, but the Sandbox functionality effectively provides the same functionality that Jails provided for CORE users. We can’t wait for Jails users to test and provide feedback on this new feature.

Community Activity

All TrueNAS processes and planning are done in the open, and TrueNAS CORE 13.3 is no exception. In addition to your input, there are also many ways TrueNAS users can give back and enrich the experience of others in the Community. Check out how you can make a meaningful contribution and play a part in shaping the future of TrueNAS.

Every contribution, big or small, plays a part in moving TrueNAS forward. Whether you share your use case, refer a friend, create tutorials or “How-To” content, or even provide code directly to the TrueNAS GitHub repository, your contribution makes a difference. And, as always, thank you for being a part of the TrueNAS community!

The post TrueNAS CORE 13.3 Plans appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Top Forums Post: How to Get Started with Jellyfin on TrueNAS SCALE

For the growing number of you in the TrueNAS Community who have migrated to or installed TrueNAS SCALE, our new Linux-based version of TrueNAS, there’s an easy way to set up a Jellyfin server with just a few clicks.

Top TrueNAS Video of 2023: Mark Rober! I Built You a Computer! By Linus TechTips

Linus Tech Tips gives Mark Rober’s data storage setup a massive upgrade in this video. Solving the problems of physical space, no backup, and less-than-optimized editing workflows, Mark gets an upgrade powered by TrueNAS SCALE.

TrueNAS Named Gartner Peer Insights Customer Choice

TrueNAS Enterprise now stands with a 4.9/5 star rating on Gartner Peer Insights. Based on verified customer reviews, this award recognizes TrueNAS Enterprise for its reliability and customer satisfaction with a 4.8 out of 5-star customer rating, outscoring Dell EMC, HP, and NetApp.

Latest Editions of TrueNAS 13.0

TrueNAS CORE 13.0-U6.1 was released at the end of 2023, serving as the anticipated final release in the 13.0 series before the major 13.1 update. This release provides fixes to bugs dealing with Apps and Pool building and is the recommended release for both CORE and Enterprise users.

TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 “Cobia” has Arrived!

TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 “Cobia” arrived on October 24th. This release marks a major milestone with significant improvements in SMB features, file copying, security, and more. Other highlights include infrastructure enhancements, Linux Kernel 6.1, improved hardware support, NVIDIA driver updates, and the ability to scale up to 1200 drives and 25 PB+ on a single system!

Honorable Mentions

• Meet the First Rack-Mountable TrueNAS Mini
• Viz Media gets “Anime-zing” Upgrade with TrueNAS Enterprise
• Adaptive Technical Delivers Managed IT with TrueNAS Enterprise

The post TrueNAS Year in Review: Top Stories of 2023 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

From “A” for APFS to “Z” for ZFS, this is true for both open source and proprietary file systems. As ZFS surpasses its 18th year, iXsystems is proud to help contribute to the process of improvement of OpenZFS far beyond the “ten-year beta” period to ensure the continued integrity and performance.

With the latest updates to OpenZFS being among the many improvements available in TrueNAS 13.0-U6.1, this release is expected to be the last version of TrueNAS 13.0, which has been the highest-quality TrueNAS release ever. The next version of TrueNAS CORE will be TrueNAS 13.1 in Q1 2024.

Virtually Everything That Can Be Fixed in TrueNAS 13.0 is Now Fixed in 13.0-U6.1

We are very proud of the quality delivered and thankful to the community for all the bug reports to help us get here.

The previous version, TrueNAS 13.0-U5.3, proved to be the highest quality and most widely deployed release in TrueNAS history with over 65,000 active systems. Building on the Enterprise quality of prior versions, TrueNAS 13.0-U6.1 is available and is expected to be the final update of TrueNAS 13.0 for both the CORE and Enterprise appliances. This U6.1 update includes roughly 20 new bug fixes and security improvements, including OpenZFS 2.1.14 to correct a rarely-occurring upstream ZFS bug.

TrueNAS 13.0 included significant new components and delivered improved performance, scalability, and reliability when compared to the previous major version, TrueNAS 12.0. To date, over 85% of TrueNAS 12.0 users have updated to TrueNAS 13.0, including most of our larger enterprise customers. In particular, the increased speed and robustness of HA failover is extremely valuable for Enterprise use cases.

13.0 is Recommended for All 11.3 and 12.0 Users

We recommend that all TrueNAS 12.0 and TrueNAS 11.3 users update their systems to TrueNAS 13.0-U6.1 before attempting to resolve any software or performance issues. This update is also recommended to prepare for future updates to TrueNAS 13.1 in 2024.

Current TrueNAS 13.0 users can update to U6.1 directly from the TrueNAS web UI by navigating to the System -> Update page. New TrueNAS users can get started by downloading the TrueNAS CORE installation media from our site at https://www.truenas.com/download-truenas-core/.

Earlier this year, there was news on the process for maintaining and updating TrueNAS CORE Plugins. Users of plugins are recommended to review this new information.

TrueNAS CORE in 2024

TrueNAS 13.1 is planned for release in early 2024 and will maintain the same storage-focused features with updates to FreeBSD, OpenZFS, Samba, and other key components. The 13.0-U6.1 update also includes some warnings and guidance to help smooth any issues for a future transition to TrueNAS 13.1, such as handling the deprecation of the embedded S3 service, or simply migrating to TrueNAS SCALE.

When Should you Update your TrueNAS system?

Our recommendations are maintained and updated regularly on our Software Status page, which currently recommends TrueNAS 13.0-U5.3 for all users and customers for stability and security reasons. As TrueNAS 13.0-U6.1 receives further testing in more customer environments, it will become the recommended release for all TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise users within two months.

TrueNAS Enterprise appliances are used by organizations that prefer a turnkey experience, optimized hardware, professional support, and Enterprise features such as High Availability (HA), Fibre Channel, Proactive Support, and Key Management (KMIP).

TrueNAS Enterprise users will have the option to sidegrade to TrueNAS (SCALE) Enterprise 23.10 and other SCALE-based releases. These sidegrades are encouraged for use cases that specifically require the unique functionality of TrueNAS SCALE. The sidegrade process will continue to be simplified and made more robust.

TrueNAS Enterprise customers are encouraged to contact iXsystems Technical Support for a complimentary technical review and assistance before updating from 12.0 or earlier versions. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, please contact us and we’ll gladly assist you.

The post TrueNAS 13.0-U6.1 is the Final Update of our Highest-Quality Release appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

The 11th annual OpenZFS Developer Summit for 2023 started today Monday, October 16th in San Francisco. Among the very exciting projects being developed, two of these projects have significant contributions and investments from iXsystems.

Fast Dedup is on the Horizon

One of the primary issues with traditional dedup with ZFS has been the need to keep the dedup tables in memory at all times to avoid massive performance penalties. This existing functionality was not very performant and led to usability issues during operation. With the update for Fast Dedup, the size of metadata is now constrained to fit in either RAM or flash to avoid hitting the performance penalty wall. The metadata structure for Fast Dedup has been completely re-engineered to enable efficient updates as well as the ability to evict non-dedup blocks. Combining metadata improvements with properly configured storage will improve dedup performance by an order of magnitude for larger systems.

Allan Jude will be presenting on the new Fast Dedup project for which iX has been the major sponsor. Together with engineers from iX, we’ve designed a completely new model for dedup which focuses on performance.

This Fast Dedup project started earlier this year and has been making tremendously rapid progress. We are working to ensure it will have the quality needed to be included in OpenZFS 2.3.

RAIDZ Expansion is Entering its Final QA cycle

RAIDZ expansion allows a small pool with as few as two drives to be gradually expanded with one drive at a time. Existing data is preserved with its original parity and the administrative process for small systems has been simplified. New data is written with the new parity. The same technology works for Z1, Z2 or Z3.

Don Brady and Matt Ahrens will be presenting the latest on RAIDZ expansion. Matt developed the initial software and Don, representing iX, has been completing this herculean task. This project has taken a few years but is now entering the final stretch and will be included in OpenZFS 2.3.

OpenZFS 2.2 is in TrueNAS SCALE 23.10

OpenZFS 2.2 is the current release and has been integrated into TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 (“Cobia”). The Cobia RC.1 version (which includes dRAID) has been successfully provided to the community with over 3,000 testers and the formal release planned in the coming weeks.

In early 2024, TrueNAS CORE 13.1 will be released with  OpenZFS 2.2. TrueNAS Enterprise appliances will also use OpenZFS 2.2 in its respective software versions.

OpenZFS 2.3 (or potentially 3.0) will take most of the next 12 months to mature and reach release quality and status. These RAIDZ expansion and Fast Dedup features will be integrated with TrueNAS then. Early availability via Nightlies and BETA software is expected in mid-2024 for TrueNAS SCALE.

Want to learn more about TrueNAS solutions in your business? Contact us to speak to a product specialist.

The post OpenZFS Summit highlights Fast Dedup and RAIDZ Expansion appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

iX-Storj Giveaway!

iX is teaming up with Storj to deliver the biggest giveaway the TrueNAS community has ever seen. 25 GB of cloud storage comes with a free iX-Storj account, but that’s not all. You’ll also be entered for a chance to win the all-new TrueNAS Mini R, populated with 12 x 6 TB drives (that’s 72 TB of raw capacity!). Other prizes include the TrueNAS Mini X (2 available) and an iX-Storj Starter Package (4 available). There are many ways to score points for the giveaway so don’t forget to subscribe to the iX-Storj Starter package for additional entries.

Enter the Giveaway Now!

TrueNAS 13.0-U5 Maximizes Quality and your Storage Experience

The new TrueNAS 13.0-U5 release builds on the Enterprise maturity of prior versions. The previous version, TrueNAS 13.0-U4, proved to be the highest quality release in TrueNAS history and has become the most widely-deployed version of TrueNAS. This new release includes roughly 60 new bug fixes including improvements to NFS, SMB, and replication. For Enterprise users, a specific fix corrects an incorrect alert in earlier generation NVDIMMs.

Read the Blog

Always Easy and Now More Affordable – iX-Storj cloud storage for $2.50 per TB per Month

iX believes that your data belongs to you and you alone, whether on-premises or in the cloud. This is why iX has partnered with the Storj Network to bring you a secure, high-performance solution for your cloud storage at a competitively low price.

With the iX-Storj Starter Package, you get 5 TB of capacity to use, and 5 TB of pre-paid transfer bandwidth for outbound traffic from the Storj network, giving you a $275 value for only $150! Check out our new TrueNAS blog for a detailed walkthrough on getting started with the iX-Storj Starter Package.

Read the Blog

Level Up your Ransomware Protection with TrueNAS!

TrueNAS offers multiple levels of protection against ransomware, including snapshots, native encryption, authentication, and containerization, just to name a few. And, of course, thanks to our community of users, the TrueNAS Open Source code can be easily validated and supported. Read all about how you can level-up your ransomware protection on TrueNAS.

Read the Blog

New Sections on Replication for the TrueNAS SCALE Evaluation Guide!

Expand your TrueNAS SCALE knowledge with our newest how-to videos on the TrueNAS SCALE Evaluation Guide, covering replication scenarios for Local, PUSH, and PULL! You can also view our text version to read along. Whether it’s your first time using SCALE or you’re looking to continue your Open Storage journey, this guide offers bite-sized advice for everyone. Click the link below to get started today!

Click the thumbnail to watch!

What Can a $60,000 Media Server Do? (Snazzy Labs)

Snazzy Labs ditched their old server to supercharge their workflow with the power of the TrueNAS M-Series. Snazzy shares what it’s like to unbox the M-Series, navigate the admin dashboard, experience the speed of the server for the first time, and more. Click the thumbnail to see more!

Click for Offer

Latest Releases

Tech Tip #124

Did you know that you can see how well ZFS compression is working on a per-file basis? By using the TrueNAS Shell or connecting over SSH, you can use the du command with the –apparent-size (SCALE) or -A (CORE) option to list the sizes of files in a directory before compression is considered. Compare this to the same command without the extra parameter, and see how effective the inline compression in TrueNAS can be!

The post Newsletter: Huge iX-Storj giveaway TrueNAS Core-13.0-u5-release and more appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Thanks to a collaboration between iX and the Storj network, a secure, high-performance solution now exists for cloud storage with the unbeatable economics TrueNAS users enjoy today.

iX-Storj is a globally distributed storage solution, with over 11 nines of durability, at a cost significantly lower than competing cloud-based archive solutions. Data is securely encrypted before being distributed to a worldwide network with tens of thousands of storage nodes. With support for the Amazon S3 API, you can access your data on Storj using a number of compatible software solutions.

Getting started with iX-Storj from your TrueNAS system couldn’t be simpler. All versions of TrueNAS have iX-Storj built in, with native support for synchronizing your files through the Cloud Sync Tasks panel. You can use iX-Storj in your home or business to provide secure, off-site backup at a fraction of the cost of comparable cloud hyper-scaling services.

The World is Your Data Archive

Unlike other cloud services, you don’t have to worry about different costs for storage or network traffic based on where in the world you’re storing the data. Storj offers one single data region across the entire world while still offering downloads from nodes close to you to ensure that you’ll get the fastest transfer speeds possible.

With the iX-Storj Starter Package, you get 5 TB of capacity to use and 5 TB of pre-paid annual transfer bandwidth for outbound traffic from the Storj network, giving you a $275 value for only $150. When comparing this cost to major cloud storage providers for comparable “instant access” data tiers, Storj offers over a 10x cost reduction.

5 TB of Cloud Storage / 1 Year

Even when compared to value-based services, Storj’s globally distributed storage network offers a lower cost-per-TB, and when combined with the value in the iX-Storj Starter Package, you can protect your data for less than half the cost. Other providers like Wasabi only use a single data center for a bucket which limits reliability. The Web3 technology of iX-Storj is significantly lower in cost and more reliable.

5 TB of Cloud Storage / 1 Year

Because iX-Storj is built into TrueNAS, all that’s needed once you’re signed up is to add your credentials, enable the Storj functionality, and select the data to synchronize. With no expensive licensing fees and no lock-in to the ecosystem, TrueNAS storage appliances provide twice the value at half the cost of other popular vendors as reported by ESG.

Get Started Today

To get started, simply navigate to the registration portal at ix.storj.io. You can also find this same link in the TrueNAS UI when adding cloud credentials. You’ll be directed to the Storj registration portal for your nearest region and asked to enter your name, email address, and a password. After verifying your email address, you’ll be prompted to select from one of three accounts. You can start with a 30 day free trial with 25GB of space and bandwidth, a Pro account, or the iX-Storj Starter Package.

With a Pro account, you “pay as you grow” only for what is used, at $4/TB/mo for storage. Downloading from the Storj network is priced at $7/TB, with uploads to the network free of charge. “Pay as you grow” with large-scale public clouds is five to ten times more expensive.

With the exclusive iX-Storj Starter Package, TrueNAS users get a special opportunity to save even more. Pay up front for one year of Storj, and store up to 5 TB of data with 5 TB of download bandwidth for only $150, a $125 discount over the Pro Account. Starter Package users that grow beyond 5 TB pay the same rates as Pro users for additional capacity or outbound network traffic.

Once you’ve got your iX-Storj account registered, this 7-minute video contains all of the steps needed to start using iX-Storj Globally Distributed Storage with TrueNAS. You can also view written instructions on the TrueNAS Community Forums. TrueNAS SCALE users can also monetize their spare capacity by joining as a Storj storage node within the global network. 

If you’re already a Storj user, or are interested in learning more about Globally Distributed Storage, why not check out our iX-Storj Community Giveaway? Learn about the advantages of the Storj network and protect your data while entering for a chance to win fantastic prizes, including the latest member of the Mini family, the TrueNAS Mini R.

Cloud storage doesn’t have to be expensive, complicated, or closed. Thanks to the partnership between iX and Storj, you can keep enjoying the same True Data Freedom that TrueNAS provides, while adding in the resilience, durability, and availability of Storj’s Globally Distributed Storage.

The post iX-Storj Cloud Storage Now Starts at Industry-leading $2.50 per TB/month appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

TrueNAS 13.0 includes significant new components and delivers improved performance, scalability, and reliability when compared to the previous major version, TrueNAS 12.0. To date, over 75% of TrueNAS 12.0 users have updated to TrueNAS 13.0, including many of our larger enterprise customers. In particular, the increased speed and robustness of HA failover is extremely valuable for most Enterprise use-cases.  Version 12.0 is no longer available for TrueNAS Enterprise, and is no longer recommended for deployment.

One strong quality indicator of TrueNAS 13.0 is that there are fewer than 10 bug fixes and improvements currently planned for 13.0-U6. We recommend that all TrueNAS 12.0 and TrueNAS 11.3 users update their systems to TrueNAS 13.0 before attempting to resolve any software or performance issues.

In the last month, there has been news on the process for maintaining and updating TrueNAS CORE Plugins. Users of Plugins are recommended to review this new information.

When Should you update your TrueNAS system?

Our recommendations are maintained and updated regularly on our Software Status page, which currently recommends TrueNAS 13.0-U4 for all users and customers for stability and security reasons. As TrueNAS 13.0-U5 receives further testing in more customer environments, it will become the recommended release for all TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise users within two months.

TrueNAS Enterprise is delivered as TrueNAS appliances to organizations who prefer a turnkey experience, optimized hardware, professional support, and Enterprise features such as High Availability (HA), Fibre Channel, Proactive Support, and Key Management (KMIP).

TrueNAS Enterprise users will have the option to sidegrade to TrueNAS (SCALE) Enterprise 22.12 and other SCALE-based releases. Currently, these sidegrades are only recommended for new use-cases that specifically require the unique functionality of TrueNAS SCALE. The sidegrade process will continue to be simplified and made more robust.

TrueNAS Enterprise customers are encouraged to contact iXsystems Technical Support for a complimentary technical review and assistance before updating from 12.0.

If you ever need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, please contact us and we’ll be glad to assist you.

The post TrueNAS 13.0-U5 Maximizes Quality and your Storage Experience appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

For nearly a decade, TrueNAS has provided rapid, reliable storage for customers using virtualization technology. From small startups to the majority of Fortune 500 companies, organizations everywhere have experienced the benefits of True Data Freedom, and each TrueNAS release continues to refine, polish, and deliver high-quality user experiences. With over 15 million downloads across the CORE and SCALE products, TrueNAS offers storage for virtualization solutions that will keep your machines running smoothly.

TrueNAS as a Storage Server for VMware/Hyper-V

As a unified storage provider, TrueNAS offers file, block, and object protocols, making it an ideal component of your VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, XenServer, or KVM-based virtualization solution. TrueNAS CORE and SCALE offer hypervisor storage over the NFS and iSCSI protocols, and TrueNAS Enterprise extends this feature set by adding support for up to 32 Gbps Fibre Channel and dual-controller High-Availability, bringing your storage uptime into the 99.999% of availability. With TrueNAS, you can experience the benefits of virtualization in its most efficient state.

TrueNAS offers advanced read caching using the OpenZFS Adaptive Replacement Cache to serve up your most important and in-demand data at the fastest speed possible from system memory. Data writes are accelerated by the use of high-performance, solid-state devices or non-volatile memory, providing sub-millisecond latency even under heavy workloads.

High-performance storage is critical to a successful virtualization infrastructure, and TrueNAS delivers just that with the OpenZFS file system. With TrueNAS, your virtualization benefits from best-in-class data integrity guaranteed, with self-healing behavior to automatically detect and repair silent data corruption. OpenZFS was specifically designed to ensure the integrity of data. It uses features like end-to-end checksumming and copy-on-write to protect data against the silent data corruption caused by everything from bit rot to current spikes, driver and disk errors, accidental overwrites, and more.

TrueNAS also helps to protect your data against the new generation of hypervisor-based ransomware through immutable OpenZFS snapshots, creating stable local or remote restore points. With its dynamic caching and storage optimization technology, TrueNAS eliminates the need to rely on multiple hard drives to get the IOPS needed for a VM deployment. No other file system, volume manager, or hardware RAID solution provides sufficient protection against such problems.

The Open Source economics of TrueNAS lets you choose the solution that best fits your company. TrueNAS Enterprise hardware scales from 10TB up to 20PB of capacity and is offered with economical hybrid performance or powerful all-flash NVMe.

TrueNAS can be downloaded and deployed for free in your environment. TrueNAS is VMware Ready certified and offers unified and scalable storage solutions to protect data, simplify its management, reduce operational costs, and optimize the performance of a virtualized environment. There is no need for proprietary hardware or software to see how your virtual environment can benefit from True Data Freedom.

For more information on TrueNAS for VMware, check out the TrueNAS for VMware Whitepaper.

Keep your virtualization solutions running smoothly. Download TrueNAS SCALE

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Fig. 1 – Non-Production and Production TrueNAS VMs

Virtual machines (VMs) provide opportunities to easily stand up instances of TrueNAS for a number of different purposes. End-users might use these to evaluate the functionality of TrueNAS in their environment, check out the differences between CORE and SCALE, or walk through the process of upgrading a legacy FreeNAS system to a recent release of TrueNAS. Developers at iXsystems make extensive use of virtualization when troubleshooting, documenting, and building new versions of TrueNAS; and yes – some TrueNAS users even deploy a fully-virtualized TrueNAS solution for their production environments.

Of course, TrueNAS SCALE also includes its own KVM hypervisor and can run its own VMs; however, that’s not the subject of this particular blog.

Before we continue, let’s open with a little disclaimer banner:

Warning

If the best practices and recommendations for running TrueNAS as a virtual machine are followed, a TrueNAS VM can be a safe and reliable way to store data. Failure to adhere to these same recommendations can result in permanent corruption and/or loss of your data without warning, even if the system appears initially functional. Please read through them all carefully!

Apologies for the Scary Red Text, but this needed to be made abundantly clear. Let’s get started!

1. Consider Your Use Case

While “test-drive” and “development” use cases can play a little bit more fast and loose with the recommendations for virtual hardware, a production use-case is where certain caveats and precautions need to be taken into account.

Testing, Exploring, or Development (“Non-Production Use”)

If you’re looking to gain familiarity with the TrueNAS UI, do some development work on the TrueNAS code, perform a dry-run of upgrading between versions, or set up any other situation where data that you care about isn’t at stake, you can likely go ahead with very few guardrails on your virtualization solution. Use your hypervisor of choice to create a VM with at least 8GB of RAM, two or more vCPUs, a 16GB install disk, and data disks of whatever size are appropriate for your testing (see later in the document for some important notes if using multiple virtual disks!) – mount a TrueNAS ISO of your choice, and enjoy.

This process can be completed in less than five minutes – or if you’d prefer, you can download and deploy a pre-built TrueNAS SCALE VM image in Open Virtualization Format.

Storing Important Data (“Production Use”)

As soon as you’re storing data that you care about keeping safe, or readily available, then you should consider your TrueNAS use as a “production environment”.  – this includes if it’s at home protecting your personal photos, or in an office safeguarding important documents.

For TrueNAS and OpenZFS to offer absolute protection for your data, they should have direct access to a storage controller and the drives attached. Without direct access, there is a possibility of the hypervisor interfering with settings, reordering or reconfiguring drives, and introducing avenues for data corruption. Virtual data disks are not as reliable, and are particularly prone to operator mistakes such as accidental deletion or inadvertent use of hypervisor-based snapshot technology.

The key piece of the puzzle is a technology broadly referred to as PCI passthrough – this might be given a different name such as “VMDirectPath I/O” “Discrete Device Assignment” by the vendor, but the core functionality must remain the same – the virtual machine must be able to address the PCI hardware device directly, without going through an abstraction layer.

When creating a TrueNAS VM for production use, the storage controller must be assigned to the VM via PCI passthrough. This will prevent the hypervisor from claiming the controller with its driver, and allow TrueNAS to use its own.

Most desktop virtualization applications (eg: Oracle Virtualbox, VMware Workstation) do not support PCI passthrough. Instructions for enabling PCI passthrough on various bare-metal hypervisors are listed below.

• VMware ESXi: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1010789
• KVM: https://www.linux-kvm.org/page/How_to_assign_devices_with_VT-d_in_KVM
• Xen: https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_PCI_Passthrough
• Hyper-V: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/virtualization/hyper-v/plan/plan-for-deploying-devices-using-discrete-device-assignment

When using PCI passthrough, TrueNAS will treat the storage controller just like it’s been installed on physical hardware. This direct access to the PCI device does prevent several advanced features of virtualization from functioning, including (but not limited to) the following:

• Hot adding and removing of virtual devices
• Suspend and resume of the VM
• “Record and replay” functionality
• Fault tolerance and high availability, including “live migration” features
• VM snapshots (note – ZFS snapshots inside of TrueNAS do work)

In order to use PCI passthrough, you need to have an additional storage controller that is not being used by your hypervisor to boot or run other data. It is suggested to use a host bus adapter (HBA) supported by TrueNAS, such as an LSI/Broadcom/Avago controller from the SAS2308 or newer chipset family.

While the older SAS2008 chipset was historically recommended, recent updates to both the VMware ESXi vmkernel and the FreeBSD 13.x kernel have exposed edge-cases that may cause system instability and failure of the VM to properly claim the PCI device at boot time. TrueNAS SCALE may be less picky.

2. Choose Your Hypervisor Platform

The iXsystems development team runs TrueNAS as a VM on a daily basis. Our virtualization platform of choice remains VMware, and it’s the platform in which the TrueNAS developers have the most experience. Both TrueNAS CORE and SCALE include the VMware Guest tools as well, in order to respond gracefully to shutdown requests from the host OS, as well as pass some information back to the hypervisor. If deploying TrueNAS for a “non-production” use case, the desktop VMware Workstation application can be used – but for a “production” VM, the requirement for PCI passthrough means the standalone ESXi hypervisor should be used instead.

Our second choice for a virtualization platform is KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) – which is also the hypervisor layer implemented into TrueNAS SCALE, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and Proxmox VE. While TrueNAS has no built-in guest tools installed for this hypervisor, you can still have a solid virtualization experience regardless.

Other hypervisors such as FreeBSD’s bhyve, Citrix’s Xen, and Microsoft’s Hyper-V may also work, but the development team does not test with or use them on a daily basis.

Regardless of the hypervisor solution you choose, ensure that you follow the vendor’s guidance regarding hardware selection and configuration. Running the hypervisor on a physical hardware solution that is supported by the vendor’s Hardware Compatibility List or similar reference document is strongly encouraged, especially if running a “Production” TrueNAS VM is desired.

3. Virtualizing ZFS

The ZFS file system used by TrueNAS combines the roles of RAID controller, volume manager, and file system all into a single software component. ZFS expects direct access to your disks in order to work properly, in order to issue direct SCSI or SATA commands and receive an expected and predictable response. The closer you can get TrueNAS to your storage hardware, the happier it is, and the better it can do its job of keeping your data safe.

Hypervisor-backed virtual disks or hardware RAID controllers provide a “translation layer” to the disks, and therefore should be avoided for the data disks. TrueNAS boot devices are an exception, and can be stored on a hypervisor virtual disk safely – but it is suggested to create two identical volumes and use the TrueNAS installer to mirror these within the guest OS as well. Ensure that the underlying physical storage backing these hypervisor virtual disks is sufficiently redundant as well.

4. Configuring your Virtual Hardware

For a non-production TrueNAS VM, the minimum hardware requirements for TrueNAS will suffice, but when assigning resources to a production instance, some suggestions apply.

4.1 Select the proper Guest OS in the hypervisor

The virtual hardware presented to a VM is often dependent on the “Guest OS” selected. If possible, choose the matching OS based on the TrueNAS version:

TrueNAS CORE: FreeBSD 13.x (64-bit)
TrueNAS SCALE: Debian Linux 11 “Bullseye” (64-bit)

Do not select a “Linux” guest OS for TrueNAS CORE and do not select a “Windows” guest OS for either CORE or SCALE. “Other OS” can be selected for CORE if FreeBSD is not present, and “Other Linux” can be selected for SCALE.

TrueNAS contains the VMware Tools add-on, with support for the vmxnet3 drivers. These are suggested over the emulated E1000 Intel card.

4.2 Don’t over-assign CPU cores

For a light I/O workload, start with 2 vCPUs and provide CPU reservations or “guaranteed execution time” if you expect periods of high overall host usage in order to prevent your TrueNAS VM from becoming CPU-starved. If you expect to use iSCSI, have heavy random I/O workloads, or run compression stronger than the default LZ4 algorithm, assign 4 vCPUs. Monitor the statistics provided by your hypervisor for signs of virtual CPU exhaustion (add more cores) and co-scheduling stalls (remove CPU cores) and adjust gradually.

4.3 Assign sufficient RAM

The TrueNAS recommendations regarding sufficient RAM still apply to a VM. As a hypervisor host often contains a large amount of physical RAM, consider assigning a minimum of 16GB to the TrueNAS VM, with more added if you plan to deploy Apps or use a performance-intensive workload. Guest memory should be reserved and locked, preventing it from being shared or swapped at the hypervisor level – this is often a requirement for PCI passthrough enablement.

4.4 Enable unique ID for Virtual Disks

If deploying for non-production with multiple virtual disks, or production with virtual boot devices, TrueNAS may raise an alert that the serial numbers of the disk are not unique, often because they are missing. While an override exists in the UI to permit the use of non-unique S/N’s in a pool, this may result in unexpected behavior when attempting to import pools. It’s better to correct this at the VM level if possible. With VMware ESXi, you can set the advanced VM option disk.EnableUUID=true as described in the following knowledge base article:
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/52815

Other hypervisors such as Xen, KVM, and Hyper-V may have different capabilities and methods of setting the serial number of virtual disks.

4.5 Avoid nested virtualization

TrueNAS SCALE and CORE both offer the ability to run VMs of their own, using the KVM or bhyve hypervisor respectively. While this functionality may work with TrueNAS itself as a VM, it can be challenging to enable, support, and troubleshoot – and is outside the scope of this guide.

Using TrueNAS SCALE with Apps or containers is expected to work on a TrueNAS VM for both testing and production cases.

4.6 In a multi-socket system, be mindful of NUMA limitations

Multi-socket systems arrange CPU sockets, memory slots, and PCIe lanes into groups known as Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) nodes – communication within a node is significantly faster than communication between nodes. The benefits of spanning multiple NUMA nodes are often limited by this link.

Take the example of a system with 2x 8-core CPUs and 128GB of RAM, divided into two nodes of 8 cores + 64GB each. Assigning more than 8 cores or 64GB of RAM will cause the VM to span NUMA nodes, causing unpredictable performance if a thread is scheduled to run on a remote core or accesses a remotely-stored part of the RAM.

For similar reasons, configure your hypervisor to “pin” the VM to the NUMA node where the HBA is connected. Remote access across the node interlink for all HBA traffic can cause significant impact across the system, as periods of high I/O such as ZFS scrubs can cause congestion. Consult your vendor’s maintenance or service guide for an illustrated block diagram or PCIe slot-to-socket mapping table to identify the correct NUMA node.

Summary

If using a TrueNAS VM for “Production Data” – data that you want to keep safe and/or guarantee availability of – the only recommended approach is PCI passthrough of a TrueNAS-supported HBA. Various alternative configurations for RAID controllers (with or without “HBA Mode” or “JBOD-Like” behavior), paravirtualized disks, and local drive mapping have been proposed and often tested by community members, but the only configuration that has proven consistently reliable over the years has been full PCI passthrough.

For non-production use, research and development, or experimentation, use your hypervisor of choice, follow the simple guidance around the guest OS, and enjoy!

Feel welcome to join the TrueNAS Community Forums and share your feedback with running TrueNAS, both the technical process of running it as a virtual instance, as well as your overall impressions of the software. As an open source product, iXsystems believes in working with the community to help make TrueNAS the best it can be.

The post Yes, You Can (Still) Virtualize TrueNAS appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Compared to TrueNAS 12.0, TrueNAS 13.0 includes significant new components and delivers improved performance, scalability, and reliability. To date, nearly 50% of TrueNAS users have updated to TrueNAS 13.0, including many of our larger enterprise customers.

Today, TrueNAS 13.0 is the default software to ship on most TrueNAS Enterprise appliances, and it is recommended for all TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise users by virtue of its improved security and reliability characteristics, compared to TrueNAS 12.0 and previous versions. The TrueNAS 13.0-U4 version includes about 60 new bug fixes and updates to OpenZFS and SAMBA.

When Should you update your TrueNAS system?

Our recommendations are maintained and updated regularly on our Software Status page, which currently recommends TrueNAS 13.0-U3.1 for all users and customers. As TrueNAS 13.0-U4 receives further testing in more customer environments, it will become the recommended release for all TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise users within two months.

TrueNAS Enterprise is delivered as TrueNAS appliances to organizations who prefer a turnkey experience, optimized hardware, professional support, and Enterprise features such as High Availability (HA), Fibre Channel, Proactive Support, and Key Management (KMIP).

TrueNAS Enterprise customers are encouraged to contact iXsystems Technical Support for a complimentary technical review and assistance before updating.

If you ever need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, please contact us and we’ll be glad to assist you.

The post TrueNAS CORE & Enterprise 13.0-U4 Delivers Additional Quality appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

In 2009, iX became the sponsor and manager of the FreeNAS project, which today is known as TrueNAS. TrueNAS is Open Storage software that protects and manages Exabytes of data in over 200 countries. Due to the significant costs of commercial storage solutions, much of this data would otherwise go unprotected without a free Open Storage option. TrueNAS topples this economic barrier, and the millions of  TrueNAS users have made it the world’s most deployed storage software, accessing billions in value each year at no cost to those users.

The critical role that software plays in addressing the world’s most pressing challenges is universally  recognized. As a result, a movement has grown to consider certain software as a Digital Public Good (DPG). A DPG is defined as open-source software, open data, open AI models, open standards, and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm by design, and help attain the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They are resources or services that are freely accessible to all and provide benefits that are essential for individuals and society as a whole.

The Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) is a multi-stakeholder initiative facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods. In alignment with the DPGA’s mission, TrueNAS is freely available to all, including those who are otherwise unable to invest in traditional storage offerings to protect valuable data. DPGs like TrueNAS represent much more than code itself and are key to accelerating the attainment of sustainable development goals in emerging economic regions.

The only way customers can truly free their data from proprietary limitations and high cost is through Open Storage. Much like how Linux and other Open Source software are now standard in every corner of datacenter infrastructure, Open Storage now is a viable option for solving data growth and supporting innovation. TrueNAS delivers the benefits of software-defined storage with the added freedom and economics of Open Source, allowing organizations to spend less money and keep more valuable data.

TrueNAS is a software solution that is changing the way data is stored and managed. Its recognition as a digital public good highlights its significance in today’s digital world, where data protection, security, and privacy are top concerns for many. With its high level of data security and privacy, versatility, and augmented quality from community testing, TrueNAS is a reliable and secure option for data storage for individuals, businesses, and organizations of all sizes. The TrueNAS Community then adds to that software value with its expert advice and support.

In 2022, iX also introduced Linux-based TrueNAS SCALE to the TrueNAS family. Like the previous edition of TrueNAS, it is also freely-available, Open Source, and based on the highly-regarded OpenZFS file system. This new edition also adds Kubernetes, virtualization, and clustering. TrueNAS continues to grow in value as a DPG with hyperconvergence and scale-out capabilities.

Brett Davis, our fourth employee in 2004 and today, our Executive Vice President, shared this message on the DPGA recognition:

“Our core purpose as a company is to spread the benefits of True Data Freedom to the world and earn the opportunity to provide organizations with TrueNAS Enterprise solutions as an alternative to traditional commercial storage systems that are proprietary, restrictive, and often overpriced.”

As iXians, we gratefully accept the recognition of TrueNAS as a DPG from the DPGA, but we did not do it by ourselves. We are even more grateful for the contributions that members of the TrueNAS Community have made and continue to offer for the good of the project. We hope that the Community will share in the pride of this recognition and in our vision for Open Storage, helping lower the barriers to digital innovation in nearly every country on the planet.

Experience True Data Freedom for yourself by visiting https://www.truenas.com/compare/ and downloading TrueNAS today.

The post TrueNAS Delivers Billions in Value as a Digital Public Good appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Compared to TrueNAS 12, TrueNAS 13 includes significant new components and has improved performance, scalability, and reliability in subsequent releases. In the two months since TrueNAS 13.0-U2 was released, it has already become the 2nd most deployed version of TrueNAS. TrueNAS 13.0-U3 builds on the maturity of the prior version with 30 bug fixes and security updates. It also includes enclosure management updates for the TrueNAS R50 Gen3, which was announced two weeks ago.

To date, more than 25% of TrueNAS users have updated to TrueNAS 13, including many of our largest enterprise customers. Today TrueNAS 13.0-U2 is the default software used for all TrueNAS appliances, and it is recommended for all TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise users by virtue of its improved security and reliability characteristics compared to TrueNAS 12.0-U8 and previous versions.

Globally Distributed Storage with TrueNAS 13

First announced in September 2022, TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise systems can now use the iX-Storj service with TrueNAS 13.0-U3. Key benefits of iX-Storj over AWS S3 include:

• 80% LowerCost – The iX-Storj service is $4 per TB per month* compared with single-region AWS S3 at $25 per TB per month. For the same price, store 5X the data with iX-Storj with the added value of multi-region durability.

• Double the Bandwidth – The iX-Storj service leverages the aggregated bandwidth capabilities of globally distributed storage. Read and Write bandwidth of GigaBytes per second is possible from a well-connected data center. Performance is typically more than double that of AWS S3.
• 11 Nines of Durability – This is extremely high durability and suitable for both backup and long-term archive applications, much like AWS S3. If the data is also stored on a TrueNAS system, the durability is orders of magnitude higher than single-region AWS S3.

The first 150GB of storage is free and can be used for testing, as well as  backup for key documents and files. Please note that only iX-Storj accounts can use the TrueNAS service and not regular Storj accounts. 

Users eager to test and evaluate the iX-Storj service can download TrueNAS 13.0-U3, and follow the remaining steps outlined in this blog. For more information, check out the discussion on our Community Forums.

What About Apps and Plugins?

While TrueNAS 13.0 is performing very well for storage use cases and jails, the benefits of using TrueNAS SCALE for Apps and Clustering is becoming more and more apparent. Kubernetes / Docker Apps are better supported by the broader community and therefore provide a better user experience than Plugins, with a much broader selection of 3rd Party Applications to choose from. 

Over the next few months, iX will begin encouraging new users to adopt SCALE for most use cases where 3rd party software will be deployed and run directly on the TrueNAS system. 

When Should you update your TrueNAS system?

Ultimately “it depends”, and we base our recommendations on how and where the software is being used. 

Our recommendations are maintained and updated regularly on our Software Status page, which currently recommends TrueNAS 13.0-U2 for all users and customers. You can expect that as TrueNAS 13.0-U3 receives further testing in more complex environments, it will become the recommended release for all CORE and Enterprise users before the end of 2022.

TrueNAS Enterprise is delivered as TrueNAS appliances to organizations that want a turnkey experience, optimized hardware, professional support, and Enterprise features such as High Availability (HA), Fibre Channel, Proactive Support, and Key Management (KMIP). Results show TrueNAS 13.0 delivers a significant reduction (>95% in some cases) in failover times. 

TrueNAS Enterprise customers should contact iXsystems Technical Support for a complimentary technical review and assistance before updating.

If you ever need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, please contact us and we’ll be glad to assist you.

The post TrueNAS 13.0-U3 Increases Maturity and Includes iX-Storj Service appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

There are two main methods of Migration to TrueNAS SCALE:

• ISO File Method
• Manual Update File Method
• TrueNAS SCALE Release Train Method

The ISO File Method can be performed by burning the TrueNAS SCALE ISO file to a USB drive using your favorite tool such as Rufus or other tools to create a bootable USB Drive. We made a video guide for TrueNAS CORE that can be applied to creating the installation media for TrueNAS SCALE too! Insert the USB Drive with the installation media that you just created into the system that you are sidegrading, then reboot the system. Another method of Sidegrading to TrueNAS SCALE is to select the latest Release Train for TrueNAS SCALE on the TrueNAS WebGUI while on the latest version of TrueNAS CORE.

Once the system reboots, use the hotkey that is defined by your motherboard manufacturer to select the USB device with the TrueNAS Image. In this case, we will select the USB drive with the SCALE ISO loaded on it.

Follow the SCALE console setup screen and select Install/Upgrade.

Next, select the drive you are using as your boot disk. It should be ZFS labeled as ‘boot-pool’ or ‘freenas-boot’.

The installer will ask if you would like to preserve your existing configuration or begin with a fresh install. We recommend that you select Upgrade Install when attempting to migrate to preserve your configuration data. Next, select install in new boot environment.

Warning: Although TrueNAS attempts to keep most of your CORE configuration data when upgrading to SCALE, some CORE-specific items do not transfer. GELI encrypted pools, NIS data, jails, tunables, and boot environments do not migrate from CORE to SCALE. VM storage and its basic configuration are transferred over during migration. You need to double-check the VM configuration and the network interface settings specifically before starting the VM. AFP shares are migrated automatically. Init/shutdown scripts transfer, but can break. Review them before use. The CORE netcli utility is also swapped for a new CLI utility to use for the Console Setup Menu and other commands issued in a CLI.

Migrating GELI-encrypted Pools to SCALE

TrueNAS SCALE is Linux based, so it does not support FreeBSD GELI encryption. If you have GELI-encrypted pools on your system that you plan to import into SCALE, you must migrate your data from the GELI pool to a non-GELI encrypted pool before migrating to SCALE.

After choosing the option to Install in new boot environment, the installer will warn you that SCALE installs into the boot pool that was previously used for TrueNAS CORE. Select Yes for this step.

After the installation completes, reboot your TrueNAS system and remove the USB Drive with the SCALE ISO File. When TrueNAS SCALE boots for the first time, you may need to use the shell to configure your network interfaces.

If you want to learn how to manually upgrade to TrueNAS SCALE, head on over to our Official Documentation for more info.

The post How to Migrate From TrueNAS CORE to TrueNAS SCALE On the TrueNAS Mini appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

• Modular architecture with easy-to-replace controller
• Over 1PB HDD capacity in 4U
• Up to 60TB of NVMe flash and 12GB/s
• Super-flexible, high-speed networking
• TrueNAS SCALE clustering and enclosure management
• Fits in an industry standard one meter rack

Let’s dive into the details of the Gen3 TrueNAS R50 and why we are excited about it.

Modular Architecture: The new R50 chassis has been custom designed with a modular controller for easier servicing. The drive drawer at the front can accept 48 top-loaded disk drives with an internal cable management arm that makes it easy to pull out and swap drives. The storage controller at the rear is removable so that it can be serviced without unracking such a large system. Unlike the numerous other high-density storage servers (e.g. 45Drives), you can upgrade or replace the controller with ease. This significantly extends the life of the system.

Petabyte Capacity: With 22TB disk drives, the new R50 can provide over 1PB of raw storage. This capacity can scale up to 5PB with two 102-bay expansion shelves. This storage is then managed with ZFS configured with single, dual, or triple parity. Lower-capacity drives starting at 4TB are also supported for workloads with more IOPS and less capacity. These 22TB drives use the latest OptiNAND technology from Western Digital for increased performance.

Extreme NVMe Acceleration: The new R50 is extended to support four full NVMe drives, each of which can range up to 15TB. These drives can be used for caching or storage and are hot-swappable. L2ARC, SLOG, and special VDEVs can be configured or used for a dedicated all-flash pool. Database applications and deduplication tables can benefit from this incredibly fast storage.

Flexible Networking: Many user environments are going through the transition from 10GbE to 25GbE and then 100GbE.  The new R50 makes it easier to upgrade the controllers from 10GBase-T all the way to 25/40/100GbE optical through the easy-to-upgrade modular controller.

Scale-out Clustering: With TrueNAS SCALE on the R50, there is now an option to cluster these units for SMB file or S3 object services. A rack of eight R50 systems can support 8PB of HDD capacity and 480TB of NVMe flash over 1.6 Terabits/s of switched infrastructure. This is ideal for high-performing video editing and storage, or extreme analytics. If you need more capacity, you can add more racks of R50s to scale out.

With all the improvements made in Gen3, the price of the TrueNAS R50 remains the same. All new orders of the TrueNAS R50 will automatically be upgraded to the Gen3 modular version. For use-cases that need more capacity or flexibility, the Gen3 version offers more configuration choices. The new TrueNAS R50 has already begun shipping.

The TrueNAS R-Series datasheet includes the updated R50 specs. The system fits in a 1-meter-deep industry-standard rack and does not require an external cable management arm. The typical power draw is under 800W for 1PB.

The TrueNAS R50 is just one of the many TrueNAS Enterprise platform choices. Shown below in the middle of the back row, R50 Gen3 is ideal for mid-size deployments and clustering. For High Availability (HA) and larger systems, the TrueNAS M-Series is recommended and scales to over 25PB per system. For small deployments, the 2U TrueNAS R20 is recommended.

For more information on this or other TrueNAS appliances or our software, please contact iX.

The post The Modular TrueNAS R50 Stores a Petabyte appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Founded in 2014, Storj is a pioneer and innovator in Web3 storage. They are the leading provider of enterprise globally distributed cloud object storage, and iX has selected them as the TrueNAS partner for GDS. The service, known as iX-Storj, is now available and integrated into TrueNAS SCALE. The first release of TrueNAS with iX-Storj is TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin BETA. iX-Storj will be available in forthcoming releases for TrueNAS SCALE Angelfish 22.02.4, as well as TrueNAS 13.0-U3 for CORE and Enterprise users.

OpenZFS + GDS  for Redundancy, Backup, and Disaster Recovery

OpenZFS (ZFS) is the technology used by TrueNAS to provide highly reliable data storage across pools of drives within a single storage system. ZFS has legendary resilience and even portability for single systems. However, any one facility or region is vulnerable to risks of fire, flood, earthquakes, or major operator errors. Data must be backed up to another site to be reliably stored. Data professionals also recommend a third site for added durability.

GDS provides another option for 2nd or 3rd locations for data, particularly for organizations that do not operate multiple sites. Fundamentally, this GDS solution has the multi-region capability and reliability to be the 2nd and 3rd copies of data. It is the ideal complement to a ZFS-based storage system that provides high-performance and reliable storage within a data center, office, or home.

Like ZFS, the iX-Storj service is inherently secure with CloudSync 256-bit encryption for both data-at-rest and data-in-flight. Most importantly, the keys are controlled by the TrueNAS administrator. Unlike many cloud storage services, neither iX nor Storj can access user data without those security keys.

GDS adds compelling Capabilities to TrueNAS

TrueNAS systems can now act as either the client that uses the iX-Storj service or “Storj Nodes” that provide storage to GDS. The same TrueNAS storage system can even do both, storing data for other systems while also protecting its own data with the iX-Storj service.

Users can quickly and easily sign-up for the iX-Storj service with a free account via their browser, submit their payment info, get their license key, and add it to TrueNAS where it can then be enabled via Cloud Sync. With a Pro account, the first 150 GB of storage and bandwidth are free, and only $4/TB for storage and $7/TB for bandwidth thereafter*. GDS with iX-Storj is a simple Storage-as-a-Service.

Additionally, TrueNAS users can even recuperate some of the costs of using the service by configuring their TrueNAS systems as “Storj Nodes” and allocating unused storage capacity to participate as a provider to the Storj network.

There are many use cases for the iX-Storj service. One example would be syncing a dataset on a local TrueNAS automatically iX-Storj in the background. This will provide 11 nines durability and a high-performance S3 recovery option, while also providing disaster recovery to another site.

Key benefits of iX-Storj over AWS S3

• A Fraction of the Cost – The iX-Storj service is identical to the standard Storj service at $4 per TB per month*. This compares with single-region AWS S3 at $25 per TB per month. Bandwidth (egress) prices for iX-Storj are $7/TB* compared with AWS at $90/TB. 80% lower in price, or for the same price, store 5X the data with iX-Storj with the added value of multi-region durability.

• Double the Bandwidth – The iX-Storj services leverages the aggregated bandwidth capabilities of globally distributed storage. Read and Write bandwidth of GigaBytes per second is possible from a well-connected data center. Performance is typically more than double that of AWS S3, which enables much faster restoration of data.

11 Nines of Durability – This level of data protection equates to the probability of data being retained for a year at 99.999999999%. To put it in context, if storing a Petabyte of data, one object might be lost every 1,000 years. This is extremely high in durability and suitable for both backup and long-term archive applications, much like AWS S3. If the data is also stored on a TrueNAS system, the durability is orders of magnitude higher than single-region AWS S3.

TrueNAS users are are encouraged to evaluate the iX-Storj service, following these easy steps:

1. Download TrueNAS (CORE 13.0-U3 or later / SCALE 22.02.4 or later)
2. Install and Configure your NAS 
3. Create an iX-Storj account (https://ix.storj.io)
4. Create a bucket and keys
5. Upload Keys to TrueNAS Credentials Page
6. Create a Cloud Sync task using the new iX_Storj credentials 

The first 150 GB of storage is free and can be used for testing, as well as backup for key documents and files. Users can consider storing more data for an affordable monthly cost.

What’s Next?

This is the first step in the iX-Storj partnership. We look forward to updating TrueNAS users and customers once GDS is ready to be evaluated on additional TrueNAS Editions.

There are many more exciting opportunities to partner and collaborate, to simplify major data management tasks. For example, TrueNAS snapshot tasks could be automatically enabled on NFS, SMB, iSCSI, or S3 datasets with replication to the iX-Storj service.

We hope you are as excited about the possibilities as we are. For more information on TrueNAS or the iX-Storj Globally Distributed Storage, please contact iX.

* – Pro Accounts: Additional per-segment fee of $0.0000088 applies. A segment is a file or a 64 MB segment of a larger file. This “metadata” fee equates to 14c per TB for larger files

We also recently took part in a Q&A Livestream with Storj where our communities asked us questions about what is to come from the partnership. There is a Thread in the Storj Sub-Forum where you can ask more questions that you may have!

The post iX and Storj Deliver Globally Distributed Storage to TrueNAS appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

TrueNAS 13.0-U2 includes over 60 bug fixes and improvements, including:

• TrueNAS 13.0-U1.1 SMB fixes
• ZFS 2.1.5 updates
• SAMBA 4.15.9 updates
• SMB1 Security vulnerability resolution
• NextCloud plugin installation fixes
• Intel E810 NIC performance improvement
• Collected memory leak fix
• AWS S3 Secret Keys for Cloud Sync fix

The significant new components of TrueNAS 13.0 were described in the Release Blog:

• FreeBSD 13.0 performance security and efficiency improvements
• OpenZFS 2.1 performance and reliability improvements 
• Samba 4.15 security vulnerability resolution
• iSCSI target bandwidth increases
• NFS server: Improved NFS 4.x support

TrueNAS 13.0-U1 and TrueNAS 13.0-U1.1 (minor update for SMB fixes) have been widely and successfully deployed, and the Community has also reported that compatibility of plugins and jails with FreeBSD 13.0 has helped with many application updates. 

TrueNAS 13.0-U1.1 has already become the 2nd most popular version of TrueNAS, only 12.0-U8.1 is higher. TrueNAS users at Linus Tech Tips recently released a video detailing their 270 drive configuration build-out using TrueNAS 13.0-U1.1.

TrueNAS 13.0 is a single, unified image that supports either TrueNAS CORE or TrueNAS Enterprise capabilities. TrueNAS Enterprise is delivered as TrueNAS appliances to organizations that want a turnkey experience, optimized hardware, and professional support. It also includes Enterprise features such as High Availability (HA), Fibre Channel, Proactive Support, and Key Management (KMIP). TrueNAS 13.0 delivers a significant reduction (>95% in some cases) in failover times, which most users greatly appreciate.

TrueNAS 13.0-U2 is intended for mission-critical deployments

TrueNAS 13.0 has matured much more rapidly than previous TrueNAS releases. There is a TrueNAS 13.0 sub-forum on the Community forums for this accelerated process and Community feedback. Tens of thousands of users have already reported a smooth software update experience from TrueNAS 12.0. For mission-critical workloads, TrueNAS Enterprise appliances with HA and support are recommended.

Please check out the TrueNAS 13.0 documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. Users can now comment on any documentation article. Please use this if you think the documentation is missing advice or needs more clarity.

When should you update your TrueNAS system?

This is the perennial question with the same reliable answer: “it depends”.

To address this with additional clarity, we have added a TrueNAS Software Status page that outlines the iX recommendations based on the type of user and how critical the workload is. Beta testers, early adopters, and mission critical users all have different needs and tolerances.

For example, TrueNAS 13.0-U2 is intended for mission critical deployments. However, our recommendation is that users choose to wait a few weeks for early user feedback before updating their software to 13.0-U2.

SMB users with security concerns should update from TrueNAS 12.0 to TrueNAS 13.0. TrueNAS makes it easy to update and roll back if there are any issues. Users are also encouraged to check the TrueNAS forums to see the experiences of other users.

Future updates to TrueNAS 13.0 will happen less frequently and will resolve issues seen in real deployments. The focus will be on increasing quality to the next level beyond TrueNAS 12.0. Users with storage-centric use cases (file, block, object) that are generally satisfied with TrueNAS 12.0 will find that upgrading to TrueNAS 13.0 will provide significant advantages without any major changes to features, data layout, tools, or user interface.

TrueNAS SCALE: The Path to Scale-out and Linux Support

Users of TrueNAS 12.0 and TrueNAS 13.0 also have an option to migrate to TrueNAS SCALE, which is based on Linux (Debian Bullseye). Users looking for scale-out storage capabilities and/or Linux-friendly hyperconvergence with Kubernetes and KVM should look at SCALE. The latest update, TrueNAS SCALE 22.02.3, was released in August and the next update will be available in October.

TrueNAS CORE: Still the Best Free NAS

For those with systems installed with TrueNAS 12.0, you can upgrade to TrueNAS 13.0 very easily. For new systems, download TrueNAS 13.0 and get started. TrueNAS Enterprise customers should contact iXsystems Technical Support for a complimentary technical review and assistance before updating.

TrueNAS 13.0 security, quality, and performance improvements should positively impact your system(s). If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on our community forums, the TrueNAS subreddit, or in response to this blog. If you ever need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, please contact us and we’ll be glad to assist you.

The post TrueNAS 13.0-U2 Release Delivers Enterprise Quality appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

The significant new components of TrueNAS 13.0 were described in the Release Blog. These included:

• FreeBSD 13.0 performance security, and efficiency improvements
• OpenZFS 2.1 performance and reliability improvements 
• Samba 4.15 security vulnerability resolution
• iSCSI target bandwidth increases
• NFS server: Improved NFS 4.x support

TrueNAS 13.0-U1 includes over 100 bug fixes and improvements, including the major items below:

• Proactive alerts for Capacity Monitoring
• Improvements to ZFS replication reliability
• Further Drive Scaling improvements for 1200+ Drives on a single system
• Support for Azure backup custom endpoints – Allowing usage of government clouds
• Fixed an issue with UI-driven disk replacements
• Corrected several memory leaks edge cases
• Enabled out-of-box support for Realtek RTL8125 network devices

Like TrueNAS 12.0, TrueNAS 13.0 is a single unified image that supports either TrueNAS CORE or TrueNAS Enterprise capabilities. TrueNAS Enterprise is delivered as TrueNAS appliances to organizations that want a turnkey experience. It also includes Enterprise features such as High Availability (HA), Fibre Channel, Pro-active Support, and Key Management (KMIP).

Thanks to a major contribution of hard drives to the TrueNAS test lab from Western Digital, TrueNAS 13.0 passed comprehensive large-scale testing on a TrueNAS M60-HA with over 1,200 drives in use by a single controller. With TrueNAS 13.0-U1, the drive scalability validation has extended to TrueCommand 2.2, allowing it to be used on massive scale NAS systems with little performance impact. It was great to see the TrueNAS 13.0-U1 system with 1200 drives failover in less than 1 minute when under high load. This was a greater than 95% reduction from previous releases and would significantly improve system availability.

TrueNAS 13.0 is the highest performing TrueNAS version for single node and HA deployments.  Performance improvements of 30% are expected for some CPU-bound workloads. Below are the comparisons with TrueNAS 12.0 for some NFS and iSCSI workloads on an all-flash system.

TrueNAS 13.0-U1 is another Major Milestone
TrueNAS 13.0 has progressed quickly to the UPDATE stages. Because the TrueNAS 13.0 changes are less complex, it has matured much more rapidly than previous TrueNAS releases.. There is a TrueNAS 13.0 sub-forum on the Community forums for this accelerated process and Community feedback. Thousands of users have already reported a smooth software update experience from TrueNAS 12.0.

The new TrueNAS 13.0 documentation is based on the TrueNAS 12.0 docs, which were more modular and expandable. The Community is invited to edit, contribute, or simply provide feedback. Please check out the documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. The documentation now has the ability to comment on any page. Please use this if you think the documentation advice is missing or needs more clarity.

SMB users with security concerns should look at updating. TrueNAS makes it easy to update and rollback if there are any issues. Users are also encouraged to check the TrueNAS forums to see the experiences of other users.

TrueNAS SCALE: The Path to Scale-out and Linux Support

TrueNAS 12.0 and TrueNAS 13.0 users also have an option to migrate to TrueNAS SCALE, which also supports Samba 4.15, NFS nconnect, and OpenZFS 2.1 (in addition to other features), but is based on Debian Bullseye and not FreeBSD. Users looking for scale-out storage capabilities and/or Linux-friendly hyperconvergence with Kubernetes and KVM should also look at SCALE. TrueNAS SCALE 22.02.2 was made available earlier in June.

Users with storage-centric use cases (file, block, object) that are generally satisfied with TrueNAS 12.0 will find that upgrading to TrueNAS 13.0 will result in significant advantages without any major changes to features, data layout, and tools, or user interface.

TrueNAS CORE: Still the Best Free NAS

For those with TrueNAS 12.0 installed on your system, you can upgrade to TrueNAS 13.0 easily. For new systems, download TrueNAS 13.0 and get started. TrueNAS Enterprise customers should contact iXsystems Technical Support for a complimentary technical review and assistance before updating.

TrueNAS 13.0 security, quality, and performance improvements should have a positive impact on your systems. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on our community forums, the TrueNAS subreddit, or in response to this blog. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, contact us.

The post TrueNAS 13.0-U1 Delivers Improved Performance, Scalability, and Reliability appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

The post TrueNAS 13.0 Succeeds TrueNAS 12.0 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Overall, Robbie was very impressed with the maturity and wide range of features. This will come as no surprise to our community. Robbie is seeing what users have known for years about TrueNAS—Enterprise, datacenter-proven, open storage software that is free for everyone, AND it works great at home!

As part of his series, Robbie was the emcee of a live Q&A about TrueNAS posing questions from his audience to iX’s SVP of Product Management, Morgan Littlewood. A wide variety of questions were answered that ranged from the basics of TrueNAS and ZFS to questions that may even stump power users. The full list of questions and their respective answers can be found here.

Overall, Robbie has created an immense wealth of content that TrueNAS users of any level can learn something new. He was pleasantly surprised by the outstanding amount of features that TrueNAS offers thanks to the power of ZFS 2.0 and Open Source technology. Plus, thanks to all the hard work from the TrueNAS team and our amazing community of over 250,000 members, Robbie had crowned TrueNAS with the title of being “in a class of its own”.

Give TrueNAS a shot and download TrueNAS CORE for free HERE.

The post Robbie From NAS Compares Reviews The Best Free NAS OS (TrueNAS) appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

One of the primary goals of storage software and TrueNAS 13.0 is to increase the availability of storage. When storage cannot be accessed, it is unavailable and costs users time and money. In some cases, these costs can be millions of dollars per hour. The typical way storage availability is measured is the amount of time the data can be accessed as a % of the time for each year. For example, “5 nines” is 99.999% availability or less than 5 minutes of downtime per year. Each system should have a target of three, four, five, or more nines.

There are various causes of storage unavailability, and these are summed to determine the actual unavailability of a system in any given year. 

Drive failures: This can be relatively frequent, especially with many drives, but there is no availability impact if you are using ZFS RAID and have configured enough spares.

Component failures: Rarer than drive failures, but component failures do happen and can cause long outages. Redundant controllers, fans, and power supplies can reduce the impact of individual component failures.

Repair times/Hardware Maintenance: Replacing a server takes time and will reduce expected availability to “Three 9’s” unless locally spared. TrueNAS HA (High Availability) systems have the spare controller built-in to enable “Five 9s” of availability.

Network outages: Rare, though these are not normally attributed to storage.  It is ideal to have dual switches and no single point of failure to ensure storage availability.

Power outages: This is a common issue in homes and offices and can be mitigated with a UPS (or a solar battery). Data Centers will generally have two or three power sources/feeds, and these can be connected to redundant power inputs on the storage. Hot-swappable, redundant power supplies are recommended for these environments.

System reboots: Systems may have to reboot in some situations. Reboot times impact availability and should be as fast as possible. Rebooting also requires the ZFS pool to be reimported and the sharing services to be restarted. TrueNAS is well-regarded with respect to the low frequency of reboots and has been demonstrated to be much more reliable than Windows Servers.

Software updates: One of the primary reasons for rebooting is to enable software updates. TrueNAS HA systems reduce this time by having the standby controller already updated and so only the ZFS pool needs to be imported.

TrueNAS 13.0 can’t solve hardware availability issues, but the software can improve storage availability. The iX engineering team has reviewed the reboot and software update times and has found several ways of improving them, particularly for larger systems and HA systems.

The major improvement in TrueNAS 13.0 is the increase in parallelism when importing an OpenZFS pool. Previously, there were parts of the ZFS file system that were single-threaded, with a single process scanning metadata across the entire pool. This serialization extended pool import times dramatically. With OpenZFS 2.1, iXsystems has contributed an OpenZFS patch that parallelizes this process so that ten or more threads can simultaneously work on the task, providing up to a 90% reduction in pool import times for large pools.

For TrueNAS HA systems, there is an automated, multi-step software update process to shutdown the primary controller, activate the secondary controller, move the Virtual IP addresses, import the pool, replay any data in the SLOGs, and then restart the sharing services. Under TrueNAS 13.0, the faster ZFS pool imports will greatly improve failover and software update times. This will be particularly noticeable on systems with hundreds of hard drives, where imports traditionally took much longer. Smaller pools with dozens of drives are expected to see a 50% improvement, but more testing needs to be done for validation. All-flash pools import much more quickly on account of flash media’s much lower latency. The reduction in failover times helps IT meet their system availability goals.

Thanks to a major contribution from WD, TrueNAS 13.0 is also the first release that is going through comprehensive large-scale testing with over 1200 drives on a single HA system. The increased lab space we have added has allowed us to house this good-looking TrueNAS M60 system. These improvements and testing capabilities are also scheduled for TrueNAS SCALE and will mature in future releases.

Another Step Toward TrueNAS 13.0 RELEASE!

TrueNAS 13.0 is progressing through an accelerated delivery of the BETA1, RC1, RELEASE, and UPDATE stages. Because the software changes are less complex, it is maturing faster than TrueNAS 12.0 or TrueNAS SCALE. There is a TrueNAS 13.0 sub-forum on the Community forums for this accelerated process and Community feedback. Hundreds of users have started their testing, and the feedback has been favorable with most users reporting a very normal software update experience.

The new TrueNAS 13.0 documentation is based on the TrueNAS 12.0 docs which were more modular and expandable. The Community is invited to edit, contribute, or simply provide feedback. Please check out the documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. 

TrueNAS SCALE: The Path to Scale-out and Linux Support

TrueNAS 12.0 users also have an option to migrate to TrueNAS SCALE. TrueNAS SCALE also supports Samba 4.15 and OpenZFS 2.1 but is based on Debian Bullseye and not FreeBSD. 

Users looking for scale-out storage capabilities and/or Linux-friendly hyperconvergence with Kubernetes and KVM should look at SCALE. TrueNAS SCALE 22.02.0 hit the RELEASE stage on “Twosday”, 2/22/22.

Users with storage-centric use cases (file, block, object) that are generally satisfied with TrueNAS 12.0 will find that upgrading to TrueNAS 13.0 will result in significant advantages without any major changes to data layout, tools, or user interface.

TrueNAS CORE: Still the Best Free NAS

TrueNAS 13.0 security, quality, and performance improvements should have a positive impact on your systems. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on the community forums, on the TrueNAS subreddit, or in response to this blog. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, contact us. 

For those with TrueNAS 12.0 installed on your system, you can upgrade to TrueNAS 13.0 RC1 easily. Download TrueNAS 13.0 RC1 and get started. TrueNAS Enterprise customers should wait for the TrueNAS 13.0 RELEASE or one of the UPDATES and contact iXsystems support before updating.

The post TrueNAS 13.0 RC1 Increases Storage Availability appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Constructive User Input

• Please keep TrueNAS CORE free!
• Applications like a file manager and activity log reviewer would be helpful.
• Can you provide better consumer cloud integration options?
• I wish there were more applications integrated into the platform
• GPU passthrough to VMs is a must for some workloads. Please allow more flexibility with hardware and SCALE.
• Please provide better guides or documentation for what everything does for people who are new to the NAS community.

Getting Involved

Want to get involved and have your feedback heard? Join our Community Forums and chat about all the things you’d like to see in TrueNAS. You can submit feature requests and bug requests here on our Jira tracker. You can also look to see if there is a similar ticket in Jira with the built-in search functionality. Lastly, you can vote on issues you would like to see implemented in TrueNAS!

Feedback and iteration are two of the most important components of any new technology or product. Build something for someone to use, listen to them, improve the product, repeat ad-infinitum. FreeNAS and TrueNAS have gone through many of these feedback loops (more efficiently than any comparable proprietary products, a feature of open source) to reach where we are today.

User Comments

• “We have used FreeNAS/TrueNAS for 6 years in our company. We have found it to be efficient, reliable, and economical. I am glad I discovered it and have been able to incorporate it into the IT structures in our business.”
• “TrueNAS saved my life—August 2021, my client was on fire. Two months before, I made a disaster recovery plan with TrueNAS. All the data was saved – thanks to FreeBSD, ZFS, rsync, and TrueNAS!!!!”
• “Keep up the good work! TrueNAS has replaced my 15 year old Gentoo install. Using VMs, containers, and built-in services. Thank you so much.”
• “Thank you all for your hard work. TrueNAS as a whole is amazing for a large number of use cases. Moved from ESXi and a self-configured NAS to just using TrueNAS SCALE for both service hosting, VM hosting, and as a NAS. And it’s awesome how it holds up to everything.”
• “Keep it up! I can’t wait for when I have some more time to try out more features on my newly acquired test server! Definitely looking forward to an alternative to VMware’s vSAN!”
• I have spent my career in IT leadership, managing global networks, infrastructure, and operations. When a need arose for network storage on a less than multi-million dollar budget, I started researching solutions and decided to give TrueNAS a try…I was pleasantly surprised! I was impressed with the ease of installation, robustness, and reliability of the TrueNAS product. Thank you!”
• “Everything is progressing really well, iXsystems got me started in servers and ZFS and now I couldn’t imagine life without it. Thanks for all the hard work over the years.”

Do You Know TrueCommand?

We also found that almost 90% of users have yet to try TrueCommand, with nearly a third of those users simply not yet aware of what TrueCommand is used for. For the uninitiated, TrueCommand is a management dashboard designed for easy monitoring and management of TrueNAS systems and drives, as well as the cluster manager for TrueNAS SCALE. 

While many users have small environments, TrueCommand is available to manage up to 50 drives for free. Given TrueCommand is meant for managing Enterprise environments, it makes sense it has fewer users overall in our community. Among those who have used TrueCommand, most are satisfied with its performance, so we hope you take the time to test it out! 

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

As a whole, the numbers show that 93% of all free TrueNAS users (CORE and SCALE) actively recommend the software. With over one million deployments worldwide, that means there are hundreds of thousands of happy users. We’re proud that so many of our users are already advocates of TrueNAS. It speaks to the quality of our free software and the influence of our community. 

With a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 64.8, we are pleased to be in the “great” category, within striking distance of 71 and a coveted “excellent” score range. As our community grows, iX is growing to support continued engineering and continued improvement in user experience. Speaking of growth, iX is also a most excellent place to work. Are you an iXian?

Thank You Again!

As mentioned in Part 1, one of our core values is “pursue kaizen”, another way of saying “continuous improvement”. It is something we apply both to our products and ourselves. Another big thanks to our users for sharing their comments and feedback. We gained a lot of insight into our community and how we can improve TrueNAS for our users.

The post TrueNAS 2022 User Satisfaction Survey Comments – Part 2 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

In our continuous effort to improve and reach new heights, we recently asked our community to give us feedback about their experience with TrueNAS. The results are in! Nearly 8,400 users stepped up and responded to our recent survey to provide their thoughts and give us insight into what TrueNAS means to them.

More than 4 out of 5 Users Agree

First and foremost, we are very pleased to learn that nearly 90% of respondents have already upgraded from FreeNAS to TrueNAS. TrueNAS CORE code was first made available over two and a half years ago in 2019, and the vast majority of users are now taking advantage of the maturity and features available.

Overall, the community had very positive feedback. Across the board, the scores show that more than 4 out of every 5 users are highly satisfied with their TrueNAS experience. We are delighted that our hard work over many years has earned such high marks, and will continue to pour our passions into developing offerings that users love.

TrueNAS CORE

TrueNAS CORE 12.0-U8 is the most widely deployed and highest quality of the current TrueNAS releases. On a 10-point scale, nearly 85% reported they are highly satisfied with their experience with TrueNAS CORE.

Even more encouraging, nearly nine out of ten would be confident using TrueNAS CORE at work. This should inspire confidence in the even the most ultra-conservative IT Admins that TrueNAS in 2022 is proving itself robust enough for many demanding applications.

If you’re happy with TrueNAS CORE, you’ll find even greater satisfaction with TrueNAS Enterprise which is built on the same foundation as CORE and designed especially for zero-downtime environments that need the added security provided by professional support. 

For the ~10% of those who haven’t upgraded to TrueNAS CORE from FreeNAS, many of the responses mentioned that they didn’t want to risk an upgrade because they “haven’t had a need” or “it just works.” These comments are very encouraging to read. It shows that the stability and maturity of older versions are still meeting the needs of these users, though there have been several security updates since, so we would still encourage those users to update when they can.  We recommend updating to FreeNAS 11.3-U5 first and then upgrading to TrueNAS CORE to retain rollback options. It’s an easy web update, and we’ve also made it simple to migrate from CORE and SCALE.

There’s never been a better time to make the move. TrueNAS CORE 13.0 will be coming soon and will introduce goodness from FreeBSD 13.0, OpenZFS 2.1.1, SAMBA 4.15, as well as optimizations for large systems with heavy disk usage. 

TrueNAS SCALE

At the time of this survey, TrueNAS SCALE was still in the Release Candidate stage. Despite that, the vast majority of SCALE users were also very satisfied with the quality, features, and maturity of the product. This is a strong vote of confidence in the changes we’ve made in the development, release, and QA processes over the past two years.

Over a hundred QA and development cycles took place to transform FreeNAS 11.3 to the current TrueNAS CORE 12.0-U8. Meanwhile, there have been about six development cycles so far to bring TrueNAS SCALE to its current release. Although SCALE is the newest member of the TrueNAS family, it’s built on the same data freedom fundamentals as TrueNAS CORE and inherits much of the work that went into TrueNAS CORE. 

As a result of its open development process, the platform is much more mature than users might have expected from pre-release software. We thus are happily surprised that 70% of users who primarily use TrueNAS SCALE are highly satisfied with the platform. What’s more, 4 out of 5 users would be comfortable deploying TrueNAS SCALE in an enterprise environment.

Thank You!

“The feedback from the TrueNAS community has been tremendous,” said Morgan Littlewood, iXsystems SVP for Product Development. “It’s always great to hear that users love the product because it indicates that we’re on the right path. The fundamentals of our products are strong, and that provides a great foundation for us to build the Enterprise edition of our product. We very much appreciate collaborating with the TrueNAS community, and we’ll continue to refine the product and add more useful features to make the user experience better for everyone.”

Part 2 of this topic will share the constructive comments and product feedback received in the survey. We invite all to look for Part 2 next week, as well as continuous improvements in future releases of TrueNAS as we pursue kaizen! Lastly, another big thanks to our users for participating in the survey. 

The post TrueNAS 2022 User Satisfaction Survey Results – Part 1 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

TrueNAS 13.0 and TrueNAS SCALE are the successors of the very successful unification of FreeNAS and TrueNAS into TrueNAS 12.0. TrueNAS 13.0 is focused on continuing the scale-up storage capabilities of TrueNAS 12.0.

The significant new components of TrueNAS 13.0 are:

TrueNAS 12.0-U8 middleware: TrueNAS 13.0 is based on the TrueNAS 12.0-U8 middleware and includes thousands of bug fixes and general quality improvements. There will be very few UI and API changes that will enable the automated testing to verify the quality of the TrueNAS 13.0 software. We are expecting higher quality than a typical major release.

FreeBSD 13.0: The Operating System (OS) is updated to FreeBSD 13.0 and includes thousands of improvements and many iXsystems contributions. Released in April 2021, this OS includes many improvements to cryptography, networking, drivers, and NUMA scheduling. Overall, Phoronix found significant performance improvements.

OpenZFS 2.1: The improvements in OpenZFS 2.0 were greatly appreciated in TrueNAS 12.0. OpenZFS 2.1, released in July 2021, has many more improvements in reliability and performance. Altogether, there are hundreds of updates and bug fixes. One particular contribution made by iXsystems reduces the ZFS pool import times. By making the process more parallel, system restart times and failover times can be significantly reduced for larger systems.

Samba 4.15: The most commonly used service on TrueNAS is SMB and is provided via Samba.org. The latest Samba 4.15 release has some security improvements and virtual file system improvements that ensure SMB support is stable and fast on 13.0.

iSCSI target: iSCSI includes support for larger native I/O sizes and general performance improvements. There will be a more detailed analysis of performance improvements closer to the RELEASE date.

Other minor improvements include:

• Intel I225 (2.5 Gbe) NIC support
• Various 12.0 bug fixes that were too complicated to resolve in a minor update

Progress Toward TrueNAS 13.0 RELEASE!

TrueNAS 13.0 is going through an accelerated delivery of the BETA1, RC1, RELEASE, and UPDATE stages. It will mature faster than TrueNAS 12.0 or TrueNAS SCALE. There is a TrueNAS 13.0 sub-forum on the Community forums for this accelerated process and Community feedback.

The new TrueNAS 13.0 documentation is based on the TrueNAS 12.0 docs which were more modular and expandable. The Community is invited to edit and contribute. Please check out the documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. 

The upgrades from TrueNAS 12.0 to TrueNAS 13.0 are expected to be very smooth due to the consistency of the software architecture. TrueNAS 12.0 enabled the merger of FreeNAS and TrueNAS into a unified software image and the new truenas.com website. FreeNAS has morphed into TrueNAS CORE and the general quality has improved with the consolidation of the CORE and Enterprise images. With the last update of TrueNAS 12.0-U8, over 85% of systems have updated from TrueNAS and FreeNAS 11.x. 

TrueNAS SCALE: The Path to Scale-out and Linux Support

TrueNAS 12.0 users also have an option to migrate to TrueNAS SCALE.  TrueNAS SCALE also supports Samba 4.15 and OpenZFS 2.1 but is based on Debian Bullseye and not FreeBSD. 

Users looking for scale-out storage capabilities and/or Linux-friendly hyperconvergence with Kubernetes and KVM should look at SCALE. TrueNAS SCALE 22.02 is expected to hit the RELEASE stage in February.

Users with storage-centric use cases (file, block, object) that are generally satisfied with TrueNAS 12.0 will find that the TrueNAS 13.0 upgrade provides significant advantages without any major changes to data layout, tools, or user interface.

TrueCommand is the Single-Pane-of-Glass Management Platform

TrueNAS 12.0, SCALE, and TrueNAS 13.0 include support for TrueCommand (Docker or VM) and TrueCommand Cloud, a SaaS version that includes a VPN capability for managing across private networks. TrueCommand 2.1 is the latest release and includes:

• Storage navigation of datasets, files across multiple NAS systems. 
• Real-time per-second statistics.
• Role-Based and Team-Based Access Controls (RBAC).
• Tracking and reporting inventory with serial numbers and support status. 
• Two-Factor Authentication and Single Sign-On. 

TrueNAS CORE: Still the Best Free NAS

TrueNAS 13.0 security, quality, and performance improvements should have a positive impact on your systems. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on the community forums, on the TrueNAS subreddit, or in response to this blog. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, email us. 

For those with TrueNAS 12.0 installed on your system, you can upgrade to TrueNAS 13.0 BETA with a single click! Otherwise, download TrueNAS 13.0 BETA and get started. TrueNAS Enterprise customers should wait for TrueNAS 13.0 RELEASE and contact iXsystems support before updating.

The post TrueNAS 13.0 BETA Improves Scale-up Unified Storage appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

TrueNAS 13.0 continues on from TrueNAS 12.0 with improved quality and reliability for general storage use-cases on both CORE and Enterprise editions.  TrueNAS 13.0 will provide major updates to FreeBSD, Samba, and OpenZFS while remaining a simple upgrade from TrueNAS 12.0. TrueNAS 13.0 is expected to get to BETA stage in February and RELEASE quality during the second quarter of 2022.

TrueNAS SCALE is an optional “sidegrade” for use-cases that require scale-out storage or more Linux capabilities (containers or VMs). TrueNAS SCALE 22.02 is in RC2 phase now and is expected to reach RELEASE quality later this month (2/22/22).

TrueNAS 12.0-U8 provides a natural path to migrate from CORE to SCALE. Users considering this migration will find supporting documentation on the new TrueNAS Upgrades page.  Migrations to TrueNAS SCALE may be more complex and require more thought than updates to TrueNAS 13.0, especially for users with plugins or VMs. 

TrueNAS 12.0: a Retrospective

While releasing TrueNAS 12.0, we created a new lifecycle model for TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise releases. The history of TrueNAS 12.0 releases has been:

TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE was made available October 20, 2020, and included many new features and performance enhancements, along with OpenZFS 2.0 support and a major OS update to FreeBSD 12.2, which also broadened hardware compatibility.

TrueNAS 12.0-U1 was released in December, resolved the most significant bugs, and enabled features like Fusion pools and efficient scrubbing/resilvering.

TrueNAS 12.0-U2 was released in February and included bug fixes with some minor features. 

TrueNAS 12.0-U3 was released April 13, 2021, and included bug fixes with some minor features.  This release was officially ready for mission-critical users.

TrueNAS 12.0-U4 was released June 1, 2021, and included bug fixes with robustness improvements. 

TrueNAS 12.0-U5 was released August 3, 2021, and included bug fixes, python upgrades, and security improvements.  This version has been very stable and is considered the best production version, including all previous FreeNAS versions.

TrueNAS 12.0-U6 was released on October 5, 2021, and included a number of fixes, nearly a dozen improvements, and a few platform enhancements. 

TrueNAS 12.0-U7 was released on December 7, 2021, and also includes a number of fixes, nearly a dozen more improvements, and a few platform enhancements including OpenZFS 2.0.6.

TrueNAS 12.0-U8 was released on February 2, 2022, and also includes dozens of fixes and a few improvements. These include:

• • OpenZFS 2.0.7  (itself has 50+ fixes)
  • Robustness improvements for cabling JBODs

TrueCommand 2.1 is the Single-Pane-of-Glass Management Platform

TrueNAS 12.0, SCALE, and TrueNAS 13.0 include support for TrueCommand (Docker or VM) and TrueCommand Cloud, a SaaS version that includes a VPN capability for managing across private networks. TrueCommand 2.1 includes:

• Storage navigation of datasets and files across multiple NAS systems. 
• Real-time per-second statistics.
• Role-Based and Team-Based Access Controls (RBAC).
• Tracking and reporting inventory with serial numbers and support status. 
• Two-Factor Authentication and Single-Sign-On. 

TrueNAS CORE is the Best-Ever Free NAS

The improvements to TrueNAS further strengthen its position as the best-ever “free NAS” system available. In that way, TrueNAS still is and always will be FreeNAS in spirit.  For those with FreeNAS still installed on your systems, we recommend upgrading to FreeNAS 11.3-U5 first from within the web interface, and then upgrading to TrueNAS 12.0-U8 to retain roll-back options.  While it is an easy web update, we do recommend waiting to upgrade your pool until you have validated your performance and functionality.  New users will simply download TrueNAS 12.0-U8 to get started.

If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on the community forums, on the TrueNAS subreddit, or in response to this blog. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, please contact us, or visit truenas.com and download the TrueNAS version that best fits your needs.

True Data Freedom is being delivered with each new TrueNAS release!

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TrueNAS 12.0 has been very successful and over 85% of FreeNAS 11.3 users have already upgraded to TrueNAS CORE. TrueNAS 12.0 has now exceeded two exabytes (EB) of data under management and is growing at the astounding rate of 1 EB every 6 months.  

TrueNAS 12.0: a Retrospective

While releasing TrueNAS 12.0, we created a new lifecycle model for TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise releases.  The history of TrueNAS 12.0 releases has been:

TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE was made available October 20, 2020, and included many new features and performance enhancements, along with OpenZFS 2.0 support and a major OS update to FreeBSD 12.2, which also broadened hardware compatibility.

TrueNAS 12.0-U1 was released in December, resolved the most significant bugs, and enabled features like Fusion pools and efficient scrubbing/resilvering.

TrueNAS 12.0-U2 was released in February and included bug fixes with some minor features. 

TrueNAS 12.0-U3 was released April 13, 2021, and included bug fixes with some minor features.  This release was officially ready for mission-critical users.

TrueNAS 12.0-U4 was released June 1, 2021, and included bug fixes with robustness improvements. 

TrueNAS 12.0-U5 was released August 3, 2021, and included bug fixes, python upgrades, and security improvements.  This version has been very stable and is considered the best production version, including all previous FreeNAS versions.

TrueNAS 12.0-U6 was released on October 5, 2021, and included a number of fixes, nearly a dozen improvements, and a few platform enhancements. 

TrueNAS 12.0-U7 was released on December 7, 2021, and also includes a number of fixes, nearly a dozen more improvements, and a few platform enhancements. These include:

• • OpenZFS 2.0.6
  • More extensive SMB regression testing with various SMB options
  • Ongoing improvements to UI & middleware performance for large drive counts
  • Dashboard fixes for CPU temp reporting
  • Various M-Series and R-Series webUI improvements

A Glimpse into the Future with TrueNAS 13.0

TrueNAS 13.0 is the next planned release after TrueNAS 12.0-U7. It will include some major component upgrades which will offer new features, performance improvements, bug fixes, and security improvements. The major component changes will include:

• • FreeBSD 13-STABLE
  • OpenZFS 2.1.1
  • SAMBA 4.15

TrueNAS 13.0 will primarily be focused on its role as very stable enterprise storage and there will be very few webUI changes. TrueNAS 13.0 nightlies will begin this month and BETA will start early in 2022. There will be additional information provided prior to BETA. We look forward to working with the community to make this a smooth release and upgrade.

TrueCommand 2.0 is the Single-Pane-of-Glass Management Platform

TrueNAS 12.0, SCALE, and TrueNAS 13.0 include support for TrueCommand (Docker or VM) and TrueCommand Cloud, a SaaS version that includes a VPN capability for managing across private networks. TrueCommand 2.0 includes:

• • Storage navigation of datasets, files across multiple NAS systems. 
  • Real-time per-second statistics.
  • Role-Based and Team-Based Access Controls  (RBAC).
  • Tracking and reporting inventory with serial numbers and support status.

  

TrueCommand inventory view of TrueNAS systems

FreeNAS to TrueNAS 12.0 Upgrades are Easy

For those with FreeNAS still installed on your systems, we recommend upgrading to FreeNAS 11.3-U5 first from within the web interface, and then upgrading to TrueNAS 12.0-U7 to retain roll-back options.  While it is an easy web update, we do recommend waiting to update your system’s zpool feature flags until you have validated your performance and functionality.  New users will want to simply download TrueNAS 12.0-U7 to get started.

TrueNAS Hardware Platforms

TrueNAS 12.0-U7 is compatible with all of the iXsystems platforms from the FreeNAS/TrueNAS Minis, to the power-efficient X-Series, all the way up to the flagship High Availability (HA) M-Series. There is also an R-Series product line that can run CORE, Enterprise, and SCALE editions of TrueNAS.  All of these can be updated via the web UI and include graphical enclosure management.

For those with TrueNAS HA systems and support contracts, we recommend contacting iXsystems support to schedule an upgrade. We will verify your systems’ health, configuration, and support the upgrade process as part of the “white glove” service that comes with any support contract.

TrueNAS SCALE 22.02 is planned for release in February.

TrueNAS 12.0 users will have a choice of upgrading to TrueNAS 13.0 or TrueNAS SCALE whenever they like.

TrueNAS SCALE 22.02 “Angelfish”  is intended for RELEASE in February 2022 while TrueNAS SCALE 22.02-RC2 is expected to be available later this month. TrueNAS SCALE 22.02-RC1 already has over 5,500 users and is getting some great reviews. 

TrueNAS CORE is the Best-Ever Free NAS

The improvements to TrueNAS further strengthen its position as the best-ever “free NAS” system available. In that way, TrueNAS still is and always will be FreeNAS in spirit.  

Please check out the updated TrueNAS documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. We’re extremely grateful for all the contributions received thus far and encourage the community to keep the suggestions coming!

If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on the community forums, on the TrueNAS subreddit, or in response to this blog. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, please contact us, or visit truenas.com and download the TrueNAS version that best fits your needs.

Here’s to True data freedom!

The post TrueNAS 12.0-U7 is Released & TrueNAS 13.0 Begins appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Matt Ahrens provided his annual “State of OpenZFS” recap of the progress made in OpenZFS since the 2020 Developer Summit, including the OpenZFS 2.0 release with the breakthrough features like the persistent L2ARC, sequential resilvering, Zstandard compression, and countless performance improvements. These OpenZFS 2.0 features are integrated into TrueNAS CORE and SCALE. 

The TrueNAS Team contributed many performance improvements as well as the major task of ensuring FreeBSD and Linux share a compatible, well-supported common code base. Alexander Motin (iXsystems) gave an eye-opening talk at the November FreeBSD Vendor Summit in which he provided additional detail about the performance and reliability improvements the TrueNAS Team has been steadily adding.

OpenZFS 2.1 included more performance improvements and dRAID (distributed RAID). TrueNAS SCALE 22.02 and TrueNAS 13.0 use OpenZFS 2.1.1, with official releases expected in the first half of next year. dRAID pools can be created via the CLI, but requires more development and testing before enabling via the TrueNAS API and WebUI. 

The upcoming OpenZFS 3.0 release roadmap was introduced along with its exciting candidate features including RAIDZ expansion, OpenZFS on S3 Object Storage, plus enhanced macOS and Windows support. The capabilities provide some terrific opportunities for future TrueNAS editions in 2023 and beyond. 

DirectIO for ZFS provides an unbuffered write path for high-performance flash-based systems by bypassing the adaptive read cache (ARC). Up to a 3X improvement in write, performance was reported with write-mostly workloads that do not heavily leverage the ARC. DirectIO behavior is controlled by the “direct” dataset property with the options being standard, always, and disabled, inspired by the “sync” property.

A New ZIL That Keeps Up With Persistent Memory Latency described another proposal for optimizing the ZFS Intent Log for use with persistent memory NVDIMM devices like those used in the TrueNAS M-Series. The New ZIL or DirectIO could increase write performance for all TrueNAS editions.

ZFS on Object Storage is a new vdev type and agent that maps to S3-API storage for cloud-backed OpenZFS. There was also a talk on ZettaCache: fast access to slow storage, a caching mechanism designed to work with ZFS on Object Storage. These capabilities could greatly enhance TrueNAS hybrid cloud options. 

VDEV Properties give VDEVs detailed reporting and configuration properties similar to those available with datasets. These tools would be very useful for larger TrueNAS systems with multiple generations of storage devices. 

Improving ZFS send/recv centered on using controlled prefetching for higher send/receive performance. As datasets keep growing, TrueNAS users are always looking for increased replication performance.

ZFS performance on Windows described recent performance improvements in the OpenZFS on Windows project which is receiving usability refinements such as integration with the Windows Performance Monitor. This work brings Windows one step closer to being a first-class OpenZFS platform. With this, windows servers would be able to natively replicate data directly with TrueNAS, as well as make OpenZFS a more universal filesystem across traditional operating system boundaries with TrueNAS CORE and SCALE.

The second day of the OpenZFS Developer Summit was dedicated to hackathon projects and one that stood out was the Block Reference Table (BRT) work which will enable file-level cloning, rather than only dataset-level and ZVOL-level cloning. This work would enable TrueNAS to clone virtual machine disk images or large video files, without depending on an enclosing dataset. 

The smaller usability improvements in conjunction with major new features demonstrate the true maturity of OpenZFS and the dedication of its development community to moving forward in unison. iXsystems and the TrueNAS development team are committed to continuing our integral role in the OpenZFS community. We look forward to the OpenZFS 3.0 release and the 2022 Developer Summit!

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As always, Linus Sebastian and Jake Tivy produced a thoroughly entertaining and technically educational video.  It’s well worth the 20 minutes to watch, and of this writing has nearly 2 million views already.

Linus Media previously used a Windows Storage Server Spaces server for video editing and TrueNAS as a reliable backup and archive of their data. They identified several key problems with their Windows storage that hindered their business operations:

1. 1. Insufficient throughput to the drive storage
   2. Excessive writing of unprotected data to RAM
   3. “Blue Screen of Death” crashes happening too frequently
   4. Storage “hanging” under high write loads – disrupting the whole business
   5. The storage was too slow – making editing more difficult

In looking for a replacement, they were looking for a Linux system with the latest ZFS, Samba, and preferably a UI. While TrueNAS SCALE meets those requirements, it’s still in BETA, so we recommended TrueNAS CORE to them because they were running a production workload that was critical to their business. TrueNAS CORE 12, which has a decade of inherited development and community testing, has been in a release state for over a year. This made it a very mature, excellent choice for a mission critical use-case of this nature.

They built a high-end system with a 32 core AMD EPYC processor, 256 GB of RAM, dual 100Gbe NIC, and Gen4 NVMe drives.  Performance was excellent and demonstrated the ZFS file system operating at 14-18GB/s internally within the system, far in excess of what the Windows storage server could achieve.

They then set about testing it with their video editors and ongoing transfers via SMB. When storage performance is adequate, the editors see very little lag and the system can stop on a dime, without “runaway footage”. The TrueNAS system delivered that performance and can likely sustain it for many more editors.

The reliability of TrueNAS under load comes from the magic of OpenZFS which is engineered for great stability and robustness. Unlike Windows Server, OpenZFS limits the amount of DRAM used for  “dirty” or unprotected data. Its design also behaves much more consistently under high load and hence supports more critical workloads like video editing and virtualization storage. FreeBSD and TrueNAS have also had extensive field testing (millions of machine years) as a dedicated storage environment which has largely eliminated the system crash issues of the overly complex and general purpose Windows Server environment. 

Technical Notes

The video included a few technical recommendations which are worth discussing.

Enable TRIM on SSDs: TRIM probably isn’t required for the performance seen. However, the primary reason for not enabling TRIM by default is that some SSDs behave badly with TRIM enabled. The Kioxia CD6 SSDs used in the video do not have this issue.

Disabling Compression: They disabled compression for storing video files. That’s not a bad decision, but might not have been necessary. OpenZFS is very good at detecting and skipping over incompressible data, so the penalty for leaving the default (compression on) isn’t likely to be noticeable in most cases.

Using ARC only for Metadata: For applications where data is not shared directly between many clients, it’s not a bad strategy. It reduces the amount of CPU used for managing a large ARC with data.  If the cache hit rate would otherwise be low, then it is worth considering. For most use-cases, the use of ARC is beneficial.

SMB Multi-Channel: Multi-channel does improve the maximum performance seen by a single client but is rarely needed. It is not enabled by default because there are corner cases, particularly over a WAN, where a file can be corrupted. However, this is unlikely to happen in a LAN workgroup environment. The latest Samba in TrueNAS SCALE now has multi-channel readily available.

Single vs Multiple VDEVs: It was indicated that a single VDEV performed about as well as two VDEVs. This is probably dependent on the testing approach being used. For a single client it is likely to be true, but for many clients, more VDEVs can significantly improve overall performance.

Multiple boot drives:  Yes, TrueNAS lets you mirror boot drives internally. For older SATA SSDs and HDDs, we did recommend mirror drives. For newer and high quality M.2 SSD boot drives, we are finding a single boot drive to provide enterprise level system reliability.

RAID-Z1 vs RAID-Z2:  They used RAID-Z1 (single parity) for their pool. This is generally fine with good quality SSDs (test or burn-in the SSDs first!) which resilver quickly and fail infrequently. As they indicated, they also have a good backup plan. With HDDs, we recommend RAID-Z2 for reliable redundancy on the local storage pool.

Get Jake to deploy TrueNAS:  Linus made a comical jab at some previous issues he had with FreeNAS. In his defense, he was often trying to push the envelope on new features/ hardware and trying to do it while doing a video.  Jake sets up his systems methodically in the background, tests them thoroughly, and makes sure they work. As much as we love Linus, new TrueNAS users should aim to be more like Jake :-). Alternatively, give iXsystems a call and we’ll get you a turnkey appliance that removes any guesswork.

The TrueNAS Software

TrueNAS CORE is free, just like the older FreeNAS. TrueNAS 12.0-U6 was released on October 5, 2021 and includes a number of fixes, about ten improvements, and a few platform enhancements. These include:

• • NFSv4 HA improvements (Enterprise version)
  • More extensive SMB regression testing with various SMB options
  • SMB shadow copies feature has been fixed (bug in U5)
  • OpenZFS dedup performance improvements by defaulting to SHA-512 algorithm
  • Better webUI snapshot filtering by name
  • UI improvements for disk temperature monitoring and UEFI booting
  • Ongoing improvements to UI & middleware performance for large drive counts
  • Improved UI for plugin updates/upgrades
  • Various M-Series and R-Series webUI improvements

Please check out the updated TrueNAS documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. We’re extremely grateful for all the contributions received thus far and encourage the community to keep the suggestions coming!

TrueNAS SCALE will perform similarly to the version Linus and Jake tests. TrueNAS SCALE is entering the release-candidate stage on Tuesday 26th October. Performance testing of SCALE will be happening over the coming months and business production use of SCALE should start in Q1 2022.

TrueNAS Hardware Platforms

TrueNAS 12.0-U6 is compatible with all of the iXsystems platforms from the TrueNAS Minis, to the power-efficient X-Series, all the way up to the flagship High Availability (HA) M-Series. There is also an R-Series product line that can run CORE, Enterprise, and SCALE editions of TrueNAS.  All of these can be updated via the web UI and include graphical enclosure management.

For an HA solution with similar performance to the system built by Linus, look at the TrueNAS M50 or M60. These systems will continue to operate even if one of the controllers were to fail. Combined with Enterprise support, you will have a 24×365 system with five nines of availability (99.999%).

If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on the community forums, on the TrueNAS subreddit, or in response to this blog. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, please contact us, or visit the newly redesigned truenas.com and download the TrueNAS version that best fits your needs.

The post LinusTechTips says “Goodbye Windows, Hellooo TrueNAS” appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Together, Nextcloud and TrueNAS combine to provide a very complete private cloud infrastructure with both data storage and a suite of team collaboration services like document creation, chat, email, conferencing, calendaring, and several others. The combination is Open Source and self-hosted for maximum privacy and security. Unlike public cloud services (e.g. G-Suite, Office 365), an organization’s data can be securely managed onsite without any third-party backdoors. The HA and integrated replication capabilities of TrueNAS allow very reliable infrastructure to be built that is less dependent on Internet access bandwidth or reliability.

Nextcloud Hub is a collaboration platform designed to be self-hosted for complete privacy and cost control. The applications included are:

Nextcloud Files: Share and sync documents, spreadsheets, presentations, photos, and any other type of documents. With Collabora Online (included), multiple users can edit documents in real-time. Data can be accessed via the web or Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android clients.

Nextcloud Talk: Video and audio conferencing, combined with chat and whiteboarding, increase remote productivity in the new telecommuting era.

Nextcloud Groupware: Calendars, webmail, and task management are integrated with Files and Talk so teams can collaborate both within and across organizations.

TrueNAS is a software-defined storage platform which provides file, block, object, and app storage built on top of OpenZFS. The powerful enterprise capabilities of TrueNAS include:

Data Management: Built into TrueNAS CORE, OpenZFS provides continuous integrity checks and self-healing, along with RAID functions, snapshots, clones, and replication of data.

Integrated Security: Encryption of data-at-rest is managed with admin-provided keys or integration with enterprise KMIP servers. Integrated VPNs and encrypted replication provide protection from hackers.

High Availability (HA): Downtime impacts productivity and is unacceptable to larger organizations. TrueNAS Enterprise provides dual-controller options (X-Series and M-Series) to deliver “five nines” availability (equivalent to downtime of less than 5 minutes per year).

Scalability: Scale up to 20 PB in a single one-rack system or scale out to even larger systems with TrueNAS SCALE. Most importantly, there is no need to pay excessively for users with high capacity needs due to photos or videos.

Unified Storage: While Nextcloud will manage a lot of data for the organization, the same TrueNAS may also manage NFS, SMB, iSCSI, or S3 data for other applications and backup systems.

An official Nextcloud plugin for TrueNAS simplifies the installation and operation of Nextcloud. The plugin can be installed with a few clicks on a webUI to create a dataset and initiate the Nextcloud instance. The engineering teams of both companies will collaborate to ensure reliable operation and resolve any integration issues found. Users will have access to both the large Nextcloud and TrueNAS communities for feedback and questions.

The Nextcloud Plugin with TrueNAS Web UI

The Nextcloud plugin is free for up to 100 users and directly available for download within TrueNAS. Small businesses and extended families can set up their own private clouds in just a few clicks. For larger schools and organizations with more than 100 users, an Enterprise support option is available starting at $8/month per user with no limits on the storage capacity or compute power per user. With the use of TrueNAS HA systems, these organizations will be able to build high-reliability solutions. TrueCommand can be used to manage distributed infrastructure deployments

The initial Nextcloud plugin will be based on Nextcloud 22 and TrueNAS CORE 12.0-U6. Collabora will run as a Linux server, VM, or Kubernetes pod. Future versions of the plugin will feature integration with Collabora Online and integration with TrueNAS SCALE for scale-out operation. We look forward to working with both Nextcloud and TrueNAS communities to deliver a first-class Open Source experience.

Later this week, on Wednesday the 13th of October (8am Pacific = 5pm Central European Time), we will host a live Q&A session with Morgan Littlewood, Senior VP at iXsystems, and Jos Poortvliet, Marketing Director and Co-Founder of Nextcloud. It will stream live from the TrueNAS YouTube channel and everyone will be able to ask them anything, so stay tuned!

If you have any additional questions or need advice on a new TrueNAS or Nextcloud project, please contact us. We are standing by to help.

The post Nextcloud and TrueNAS Collaborate to Help You Build Your Private Cloud appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

TrueNAS 12.0-U5 and U5.1 were the most popular releases of TrueNAS ever. Over 65% of the FreeNAS 11.3 installed base has upgraded to TrueNAS CORE.  TrueNAS 12.0 exceeded one exabyte (EB) of data under management in June and is now approaching 2 EB. The FreeNAS.org website has been folded into the TrueNAS.com website to give our community one source for all things TrueNAS/FreeNAS-related.   All FreeNAS versions have officially been moved to “legacy” status.  

While releasing TrueNAS 12.0, we created a new lifecycle model for TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise releases.  The history of TrueNAS 12.0 releases has been:

TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE was made available October 20, 2020, and included many new features and performance enhancements, along with OpenZFS 2.0 support and a major OS update to FreeBSD 12.2, which also broadened hardware compatibility.

TrueNAS 12.0-U1 was released in December, resolved the most significant bugs, and enabled features like Fusion pools and efficient scrubbing/resilvering.

TrueNAS 12.0-U2 was released in February and included bug fixes with some minor features. 

TrueNAS 12.0-U3 was released April 13, 2021, and included bug fixes with some minor features.  This release was officially ready for mission-critical users.

TrueNAS 12.0-U4 was released June 1, 2021, and included bug fixes with robustness improvements. 

TrueNAS 12.0-U5 was released August 3, 2021, and included bug fixes, python upgrades, and security improvements.  This version has been very stable and is considered the best production version, including all previous FreeNAS versions.

TrueNAS users have reported that updates have been smoother than ever with the 12.0 releases.

TrueNAS 12.0-U6 was released on October 5, 2021, and includes a number of fixes, about ten improvements, and a few platform enhancements. These include:

• • NFSv4 HA improvements
  • More extensive SMB regression testing with various SMB options
  • SMB shadow copies feature has been fixed (bug in U5)
  • OpenZFS dedup performance improvements by defaulting to SHA-512 algorithm
  • Better webUI snapshot filtering by name
  • UI improvements for disk temperature monitoring and UEFI booting
  • Ongoing improvements to UI & middleware performance for large drive counts
  • Improved UI for plugin updates/upgrades
  • Various M-Series and R-Series webUI improvements

Please check out the updated TrueNAS documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. We’re extremely grateful for all the contributions received thus far and encourage the community to keep the suggestions coming!

In addition to improving TrueNAS 12.0 software, we’re also actively partnering with companies that deliver some significant value-add to TrueNAS users. Futurex announced yesterday that they have integrated their KMIP management servers with the KMIP capability in TrueNAS 12.0 Enterprise.  Later this month, there will be a joint announcement with Nextcloud about collaboration between the TrueNAS and Nextcloud platforms.

FreeNAS to TrueNAS 12.0 Upgrades are Easy

For those with FreeNAS installed on your system, we recommend upgrading to FreeNAS 11.3-U5 first and then upgrading to TrueNAS 12.0-U6 with a single click to retain roll-back options.  While it is an easy web update, we do recommend waiting to update your system’s zpool feature flags until you have validated your performance and functionality.  New users will want to simply download TrueNAS 12.0-U6 to get started.

TrueNAS Hardware Platforms

TrueNAS 12.0-U6 is compatible with all of the iXsystems platforms from the FreeNAS/TrueNAS Minis, to the power-efficient X-Series, all the way up to the flagship High Availability (HA) M-Series. There is also an R-Series product line that can run CORE, Enterprise, and SCALE editions of TrueNAS.  All of these can be updated via the web UI and include graphical enclosure management.

For those with TrueNAS HA systems and support contracts, we recommend contacting iXsystems support to schedule an upgrade. We will verify your systems’ health, configuration, and support the upgrade process as part of the “white glove” service that comes with any support contract.

TrueCommand 2.0 is the Single-Pane-of-Glass Management Platform

TrueNAS 12.0 includes support for TrueCommand (Docker or VM) and TrueCommand Cloud, a SaaS version that includes a VPN capability for managing across private networks.  TrueCommand 2.0  includes a storage navigator to view datasets, files across multiple NAS systems, and real-time per-second statistics. The latest version, TrueCommand 2.0.2, includes the capability to track and report inventory with serial numbers and support status. 

TrueCommand inventory view of TrueNAS systems

TrueNAS 13.0 and SCALE are Progressing

TrueNAS users will have a choice of migrating to SCALE (Linux containers, hyperconvergence, and scale-out) or maintaining their TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise operations.  TrueNAS 12.0-U7 is planned for the January timeframe. The next version of TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise will be 13.0 and will be based on FreeBSD 13.0.  Early development has begun and more information will be available later this year. 

TrueNAS SCALE 21.08-BETA already has over 3,000 users and is getting very positive early reviews. For the next few months, the focus will be on getting TrueNAS SCALE to a release quality similar to TrueNAS CORE/Enterprise 12.0. TrueNAS SCALE 22.02 is expected to be a solid, feature-complete Release Candidate (RC) release planned for the end of October.

TrueNAS CORE is the Best-Ever Free NAS

The improvements to TrueNAS further strengthen its position as the best-ever “free NAS” system available. In that way, TrueNAS still is and always will be FreeNAS in spirit.  

If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on the community forums, on the TrueNAS subreddit, or in response to this blog. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, please contact us, or visit the newly redesigned truenas.com and download the TrueNAS version that best fits your needs.

Here’s to storage freedom!

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It’s now time to thank the FreeNAS shark for its service. FreeNAS 11.3-U5 played its part by being a very stable and reliable release. TrueNAS 12.0 is now much faster, more secure, and more reliable than any previous FreeNAS release.

TrueNAS 12.0-U5 was released today and is now the recommended update for even the most conservative users of both TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise. Wait a couple of weeks for community feedback and then update.  It will ship by default on all new TrueNAS systems.

In October of last year, the first release of TrueNAS 12.0 marked the official merger of FreeNAS and TrueNAS into a unified software image, accompanied by a long list of features and performance improvements.  Since then, over 70% of the FreeNAS 11.3 installed base have already migrated to TrueNAS CORE.  TrueNAS 12.0 passed one exabyte (EB) of data under management over two months ago; this number is now about 1.5 EB.

FreeNAS Transition to “Legacy” status as TrueNAS 12.0-U5 isReleased

In the near future, the FreeNAS.org website will be redirected to the newer-styled TrueNAS.com website.  There will be very little change for most users, but Google searches will be redirected to current TrueNAS software and not the legacy software information.  (We will maintain a page on truenas.com for legacy FreeNAS software downloads).

While releasing TrueNAS 12.0, we created a new lifecycle model for TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise releases.  The history of TrueNAS 12.0 releases has been:

TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE was made available October 20, 2020, and included many new features along with OpenZFS 2.0 support.

TrueNAS 12.0-U1 was released in December, resolved the most significant bugs, and enabled features like Fusion pools, efficient scrubbing/resilvering.

TrueNAS 12.0-U2 was released in February, and included bug fixes and minor features. 

TrueNAS 12.0-U3 was released April 13, 2021, and included bug fixes and some minor features.  This release was recommended for mission-critical users.

TrueNAS 12.0-U4 was released June 1, 2021, and included bug fixes and robustness improvements. 

TrueNAS users have been reporting that updates have been smooth.

TrueNAS 12.0-U5 was released on August 3, 2021.  A full list of changes and bugs is available for those with an account on the TrueNAS Jira bug tracker. Issues resolved include:

• About twenty improvements and eighty bug fixes. 
• Python upgrades to address potential memory leaks and eliminate rare middleware crashes. 
• OpenZFS update to 2.0.5.
• Several security updates to key components that are not available in 11.3.
• TrueNAS R-Series and Mini Enclosure management has been improved.
• Several WebUI improvements – including resolving a dashboard CPU% bug.
• NVMe drives automatic resizing support.
• M-Series HA improvements.

Please check out the updated TrueNAS documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. We’re extremely grateful for all the contributions received thus far and encourage more user suggestions going forward.

FreeNAS to TrueNAS 12.0 Upgrades are Easy

TrueNAS 12.0-U5 is compatible with all of the iXsystems platforms from the FreeNAS/TrueNAS Minis, to the power-efficient X-Series, all the way up to the flagship High Availability (HA) M-Series. There is also a new R-Series product line that can run CORE, Enterprise, and SCALE editions of TrueNAS.  All of these can be updated via the web UI and include graphical enclosure management.R-Series enclosure management showing a drive and its associated vdev

For those with FreeNAS installed on your system, we recommend upgrading to FreeNAS 11.3-U5 first and then upgrading to TrueNAS 12.0-U5 with a single click to retain roll-back options.  While it is an easy web update, we do recommend waiting to update your system’s zpool feature flags until you are finished validating your performance and functionality.  

For those with TrueNAS HA systems and support contracts, we recommend contacting iXsystems support to schedule an upgrade. We will verify your systems’ health, configuration, and support the upgrade process as part of the “white glove” service that comes with any support contract.

For new users, download TrueNAS 12.0-U5 to get started.

TrueCommand 2.0 is the Single-Pane-of-Glass Management Platform

TrueNAS 12.0 includes support for TrueCommand (Docker or VM) and TrueCommand Cloud, a SaaS version that includes a VPN capability for managing across private networks.  TrueCommand 2.0  includes a storage navigator to view datasets, files across multiple NAS systems, and real-time per-second statistics.

TrueCommand view of TrueNAS systems with per second updates

TrueNAS 13.0 and SCALE are Progressing

TrueNAS users will have a choice of migrating to SCALE (Linux containers, hyperconvergence, and scale-out) or maintaining their TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise operations.  TrueNAS 12.0-U6 is planned for the November timeframe. The next version of TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise will be 13.0 and will be based on FreeBSD 13.0.  Early development has begun and more information will be available later this year. 

TrueNAS SCALE 21.06-BETA already has thousands of users and is getting very positive early reviews. For the next five months, the focus will be on getting TrueNAS SCALE to a release quality similar to TrueNAS CORE/Enterprise 12.0. TrueNAS SCALE 21.08 is expected to be a solid, largely feature-complete BETA release.  A Release Candidate is planned for early Q4. 

TrueNAS CORE is the Best-Ever Free NAS

TrueNAS 12.0-U5 improvements continue its tradition as the best-ever “free NAS” system available. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on the community forums, on the TrueNAS subreddit, or in response to this blog. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, please contact us. 

The post TrueNAS 12.0-U5 Released, FreeNAS Transitions to “Legacy” Status appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

• About a dozen improvements and 110 bug fixes are included.
• Python upgrade and several improvements to address memory leaks and reduce potential crashes of core middleware processes.  This rare issue does not impact ongoing data services and has proven to be difficult to reproduce.
• OpenZFS improvements for both small and high-performance systems. Performance during scrubs while under high CPU load should be more reliable.
• Security updates for OpenVPN, Samba, and other ports.
• Replication WebUI improvements to simply process and avoid mistakes.
• Updated Minio (the S3 target) to the latest version which includes support for APIv3.
• Minor WebUI and reporting issues including the display of more jails per page.
• New driver support for Realtek RTL8125/RTL8111 Ethernet devices (2.5GBase-T).

Please check out the new TrueNAS documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. We’re extremely grateful for all the contributions received thus far and encourage more user suggestions going forward.
TrueNAS 13.0 Planning has Begun
The next version of TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise will be 13.0 and will be based on FreeBSD 13.0.  Early planning has begun and more information will be available later this year. For the next six months, the focus will be on getting TrueNAS SCALE to a release quality similar to 12.0. With that work completed, users will have a choice of migrating to SCALE (Linux containers and scale-out) or maintaining their TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise operations.  A U5 update to TrueNAS 12.0 is planned for the September timeframe.
FreeNAS to TrueNAS 12.0 Upgrades are Easy
TrueNAS 12.0-U4 is compatible with all of the iXsystems platforms from the FreeNAS/TrueNAS Minis, to the power-efficient X-Series, all the way up to the flagship High Availability (HA) M-Series. There is also a new R-Series product line that can run CORE, Enterprise, and SCALE editions of TrueNAS.  All of these can be updated via the web UI.
For those with FreeNAS installed on your system, we recommend upgrading to FreeNAS 11.3-U5 first and then upgrading to TrueNAS 12.0-U4 with a single click to retain roll-back options.  While it is an easy web update, we do recommend waiting to update your system’s zpool feature flags until you are finished validating your performance and functionality.
For those with TrueNAS HA systems and support contracts, we recommend contacting iXsystems support to schedule an upgrade. We will verify your systems’ health, configuration, and support the upgrade process as part of the “white glove” service that comes with any support contract.
For new users, download TrueNAS 12.0-U4 to get started.
TrueCommand 2.0 is the Single-Pane-of-Glass Management Platform
TrueNAS 12.0 also includes support for TrueCommand and TrueCommand Cloud, a SaaS version that includes a VPN capability for managing across private networks.  TrueCommand 2.0 BETA is available and will be released later in June.  This version includes a storage navigator to view datasets, files, multiple NAS systems, and real-time per-second statistics.
TrueNAS CORE: Still the Best Free NAS
TrueNAS 12.0-U4 improvements continue to make it the best free NAS system available. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on the community forums, the TrueNAS subreddit, or in response to this blog. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, please contact us.

The post TrueNAS 12.0 Surpasses an Exabyte Under Management appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

The post TrueNAS enables Container Storage and Kubernetes appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

• TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE was made available October 20, 2020 and included many new features along with OpenZFS 2.0 support.
• TrueNAS 12.0-U1 was released in December, resolved the most significant bugs, and enabled a few new features like Fusion pools and better scrubbing and resilvering.
• TrueNAS 12.0-U1.1 was released in January to hotfix a serious OpenZFS bug that was causing data/read cache corruption while acting as storage for Virtualization workloads…
• TrueNAS 12.0-U2 has been released and includes many bug fixes and some minor features. A full list of changes and bugs* is available. (*Note: Please register and log in to view the full list)

Major Bugs resolved in 12.0-U2 include:

• Networking Performance: A performance bug has been found in Chelsio and Intel drivers for FreeBSD 12.2.
• OpenZFS ACoW Corruption: While fixed in Hot-Patch U1.1, users still running 12.0 or 12.0-U1 are encouraged to update right away to avoid any potential issues on workloads using another filesystem on top of ZFS (Typically Virtualization Specific).
• SMTP Oauth: Resolves an issue with setting up email alerts while using Gmail’s Oauth functionality.

Coming Soon!

• SCALE Migration: A path to migrate from TrueNAS CORE to TrueNAS SCALE will be documented and made available for testing in the near future. This migration path is for convenience for SCALE enthusiasts who want to experiment with Linux containers and is not recommended for TrueNAS CORE users happy with their deployments.

TrueNAS Quality Lifecycle
While releasing TrueNAS 12.0, we created a new lifecycle model for TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise releases. The table below summarizes our current processes and the dates for TrueNAS 12.0. We always recommend that mission critical use cases should also wait for a version to be widely deployed before deploying it themselves.

TrueNAS 12.0 Documentation has reached content parity with 11.3
TrueNAS 12.0 has moved to a more modern documentation style that encourages contribution. The new and modular documentation is now as comprehensive as that of FreeNAS 11.3. We’ve now started an initiative to simplify navigation and improve usability. Please check out the 12.0 documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. We’re grateful for all the contributions received thus far!
Migrating to TrueNAS SCALE
One of the side benefits of the massive TrueNAS 12.0 and OpenZFS 2.0 work is that it paved the way for TrueNAS SCALE. While TrueNAS SCALE 20.12 “Angelfish” is based on 90% of the same software, SCALE is still in ALPHA state. For most users, we recommend moving to TrueNAS 12.0 and OpenZFS 2.0. From there, users can either stay with the CORE edition or migrate to SCALE for Linux services and scale-out functionality. We call this flexibility “Storage Freedom”. Post TrueNAS 12.0-U2, we will enable a migration path to TrueNAS SCALE for those that want to test Kubernetes or scale-out before it is fully GA. Like TrueNAS CORE, TrueNAS SCALE is free and Open Source.
FreeNAS to TrueNAS 12.0 Upgrades are Easy
For those with FreeNAS installed on your system, we recommend upgrading to FreeNAS 11.3-U5 first and then upgrading to TrueNAS 12.0-U2 with a single click to retain roll-back options. Otherwise, download TrueNAS 12.0-U2 to get started.
TrueNAS 12.0-U2 can operate on all of the iXsystems platforms from the FreeNAS and TrueNAS Minis, to the power-efficient X-Series, all the way up to the flagship High availability (HA) M-Series. There is also a new R-Series product line that can run CORE, Enterprise, and SCALE editions of TrueNAS.
For those with TrueNAS HA systems and support contracts, we recommended contacting iXsystems support to schedule an upgrade. We will verify your systems’ health, configuration, and support the upgrade process to minimize issues.
TrueCommand Cloud
TrueNAS 12.0 also includes support for TrueCommand and TrueCommand Cloud, a SaaS version that includes a VPN capability for managing across private networks. TrueCommand Cloud is generally available and based on TrueCommand 1.3.2. TrueCommand 2.0 will begin to trial this month and includes a storage navigator for browsing files, directories, and datasets.
TrueNAS CORE: Still the best Free NAS
TrueNAS 12.0-U2 improvements continue to make it the best Free NAS system available. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on the community forums, on the TrueNAS subreddit, or in response to this blog. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, please contact us.

The post TrueNAS 12.0-U2 is Released appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Available Now!

After 11 months of testing the OpenZFS 2.0 codebase, we are very comfortable with its quality and even more enthusiastic about the performance and features it brings.
TrueNAS 12.0-U1 was made available yesterday (December 9, 2020), and with it, TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise now have OpenZFS 2.0 RELEASE included. TrueNAS SCALE 20.12 has integrated OpenZFS 2.0 RELEASE into its nightly and will be included in the official release due out next week. Complete integration of OpenZFS 2.0 RELEASE will be achieved within three weeks.

What’s the big deal with OpenZFS 2.0?

ZFS has been a big deal for over a decade and a half as an enterprise file system with unequaled data protection features. FreeNAS and TrueNAS embraced ZFS and have made it the “easy button” for ZFS for nearly 10 years, with over 1 million deployments on FreeBSD. There have been more deployments of ZFS via TrueNAS (and FreeNAS) than any other platform.

OpenZFS 2.0.0 unifies the OS support for ZFS and is thoroughly described in this Ars Technica article. One of the major contributions of iXsystems was ensuring that FreeBSD and Linux were equally well supported and synchronized in OpenZFS 2.0. The software is automatically tested and verified on both OSes, and the differences between the two OSes is limited to a small number of source code files for excellent maintainability. With this evolution, Linux-based systems can replicate to and from FreeBSD-based systems, and pools from one can also be imported by the other. This capability is the key to TrueNAS CORE/Enterprise being able to coexist with TrueNAS SCALE.
TrueNAS 12.0 has a long list of features and performance improvements, many of which are made possible by OpeZFS 2.0. Thus far, TrueNAS 12.0 has been clocked at over 1.2 Million IOPS and over 23GB/s on a TrueNAS M60 and generally showed 20-30% performance improvements on larger systems. Other OpenZFS 2.0 benefits include:

• Metadata on Flash: Special SSD vdevs can be used for Metadata acceleration. This can include both file system metadata and dedupe tables.
• Fusion Pools: Special SSD vdevs (known in OpenZFS parlance as “special allocation classes”) can also be used for data based on I/O write size. This is configurable on a per dataset basis. Users can accelerate database datasets or special VMs.
• Dataset Encryption: Specific datasets can be selected or deselected for encryption with a user-provided key. When replicating the dataset to another TrueNAS, the key does not have to be provided and so the data can be transmitted and stored in the original encrypted state.
• Asynchronous Trim: Trim commands free up space, particularly within SSDs. By making these Trim commands asynchronous, they scale and perform better. This is particularly useful for deduplication of flash storage and can significantly reduce costs.
• Faster Boot: OpenZFS 2.0 includes a more parallel process for importing a ZFS pool with many drives. This reduces boot and failover times.
• Persistent L2ARC: L2ARC (flash-based read cache) now survives reboots and failovers without clearing its cache, saving hours or days it formerly took to rehydrate larger cache, and allowing performance-sensitive systems to get back to full speed without delay.
• ZFS async DMU and CoW: Within the original ZFS is a Data Management Unit (DMU) and an algorithm for Copy-on-Write (CoW). These algorithms were implemented in a synchronous manner, which required a transaction to wait until another transaction was completed. iXsystems contributed to the conversion of these algorithms to an asynchronous approach, which reduces the amount of wait time and increases parallelism in OpenZFS 2.0. An added benefit is that fewer disk I/Os are needed for sequential writes. This increases drive efficiency and reduces latency in heavy workloads.
• ZFS Record Size Increases: One benefit of async CoW is that larger ZFS record sizes will perform better with fewer Read-Modify-Write activities. Instead of operating with 128KB record size, a 256KB or 512KB record size may be beneficial for some workloads. This will increase the bandwidth of many RAIDZ1/2/3 VDEVs.

Storage Freedom with TrueNAS SCALE

One of the side benefits of the massive TrueNAS 12.0 and OpenZFS 2.0 work is TrueNAS SCALE. Next week we’ll release the second Beta version, TrueNAS SCALE 20.12 “Angelfish”. For most users, we recommend moving to TrueNAS 12.0 and OpenZFS 2.0. From there, users can stay with CORE or Enterprise editions, or migrate in 2021 to SCALE for Linux services or scale-out functionality. We call this flexibility, “Storage Freedom” and an easy migration will be available in TrueNAS 12.0-U2.

TrueNAS 12.0 Upgrades are Easy

For those with FreeNAS 11.3 still installed on your system, you can upgrade to TrueNAS CORE 12.0 RELEASE with a single click! Otherwise, download TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE to get started.
TrueNAS 12.0 can operate on all of the iXsystems platforms from the FreeNAS and TrueNAS Minis, to the power-efficient X-Series, all the way up to the flagship High availability (HA) M-Series. There is also a new R-Series product line that can run CORE, Enterprise, and SCALE editions of TrueNAS 12.0.
For those with TrueNAS HA systems and support contracts, we recommended contacting iXsystems support to schedule an upgrade. We will verify your systems’ health, configuration, and support the upgrade process to minimize issues. On December 22, we plan to enable the upgrades to be done from the UI.

The post OpenZFS 2.0 Ships First on TrueNAS appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Bugs resolved include:

• Reporting UI: Issues with some WebUI themes causing the Reporting sections of the UI to not fully load and display data.
• SNMP Performance: SNMP usage leading to very high CPU utilization.

New features added include:

• TRIM: TRIM can now be enabled or disabled via the webUI. It improves performance with SSDs that have high quality TRIM implementations.
• Top Users: The system can report the busiest storage clients and which protocols they are using via SNMP.
• Scrub and resilver Performance: Improvements in the algorithms allow scrubbing and resilvering to have less impact on busy workloads while also completing faster.
• Fusion Pools (the ability to have SSDs and HDDs in the same pools): The webUI has added the capability to specify that small blocks are assigned to the special flash vdevs. The size of the small block is configurable.

TrueNAS System improvements include:

• • M60: The TrueNAS M60 (with up to 23GB/s and 1 Million IOPS), the ES-102 (102 bay HDD expansion), and the ES-24F (24 SSD bay expansion), and are all now shipping with visual enclosure management.

• • R-Series: Visual enclosure Management has been enabled for the TrueNAS R10, R20, R40, and R50 so that the status of drives and systems are easily viewed remotely.

• NVME Hot swap enables the high performance drives to be used as performance vdevs in Fusion pools (pools with flash vdevs and HDD vdevs). Early testing of Fusion Pools has been promising and there will be more to come later.
• Mini and X-Series systems will also benefit from all the bug fixes and new features.

Below is a graphic showing TrueNAS 12.0-U1 enclosure management of the TrueNAS R50 with 48 HDD bays. It simplifies monitoring, diagnostics, and operations of larger systems, saving hours of admin time and further preventing downtime.

TrueCommand CLOUD
TrueNAS 12.0 also includes support for TrueCommand CLOUD, a SaaS version of TrueCommand which includes a VPN capability for managing across sites. Service trials have started and are going well. We expect to make this service generally available in December at the same time as TrueNAS 12.0-U1.

TrueNAS 12.0 Documentation is reaching parity with 11.3
TrueNAS 12.0 has moved to a more modern documentation style that encourages contribution. The new documentation is more modular and expandable, and is now nearly as comprehensive as that of FreeNAS 11.3. We’ll continue to improve usability once completeness is achieved. Please check out the 12.0 documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. We’re grateful for all the contributions received thus far!

Migrating between TrueNAS 12.0-U2 and TrueNAS SCALE 20.12
One of the side benefits of the massive TrueNAS 12.0 and OpenZFS 2.0 work is TrueNAS SCALE. While TrueNAS SCALE 20.10 “Angelfish” is based on 90% of the same software, SCALE is less mature but very promising. For most users, we recommend moving to TrueNAS 12.0 and OpenZFS 2.0. From there, users can stay with CORE or Enterprise editions or migrate in 2021 to SCALE for Linux services or scale-out functionality. We call this flexibility, “Storage Freedom”. In TrueNAS 12.0-U2 we plan to automate migration to TrueNAS SCALE for those that need Kubernetes or scale-out. Like TrueNAS CORE, TrueNAS SCALE is free and Open Source.

FreeNAS to TrueNAS 12.0 Upgrades are Easy
For those with FreeNAS installed on your system, we recommend upgrading first to FreeNAS 11.3-U5 and then you can upgrade to TrueNAS 12.0 with a single click and roll-back options! Otherwise, download TrueNAS 12.0 to get started.
TrueNAS 12.0 can operate on all of the iXsystems platforms from the FreeNAS and TrueNAS Minis, to the power-efficient X-Series, all the way up to the flagship High availability (HA) M-Series. There is also a new R-Series product line that can run CORE, Enterprise, and SCALE editions of TrueNAS.
For those with TrueNAS HA systems and support contracts, we recommended contacting iXsystems support to schedule an upgrade. We will verify your systems’ health, configuration, and support the upgrade process to minimize issues.

TrueNAS CORE: Still the best Free NAS
TrueNAS 12.0-U1 improvements continue to make it the best Free NAS system available. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on the community forums, on the TrueNAS subreddit, or in response to this blog. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, please contact us.

The post TrueNAS 12.0-U1 is Scheduled for early December appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

With the merger of the software, we are also making progress toward a new and improved TrueNAS.com website, which is the future home of all things TrueNAS-related. The chart below describes the transition.

And, here is the long list of features and performance improvements.

Prior to this RELEASE version, almost 7,000 users were involved in putting TrueNAS 12.0 software through its paces. During the pre-RELEASE process, TrueNAS 12.0 demonstrated over 1.2 Million IOPS and over 23GB/s on a TrueNAS M60. TrueNAS 12.0 RC1 provided the stability needed to move many enthusiasts into production. Many thanks for the positive feedback and the bug reports, which were mostly minor or hardware-specific.

TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE is expected to be very solid and perform significantly better than the 11.3 versions. It is also the first production RELEASE of the OpenZFS 2.0 base. Snapshot your pool, backup your data, and try it out! You can download it here. There is a TrueNAS 12.0 sub-forum on the Community forums for this unification process and Community feedback.

An updated summary of the TrueNAS 12.0 features is below (with capabilities specific to TrueNAS Enterprise identified by the light blue text). As promised, no features were removed from FreeNAS 11.3, but many features have been added.

TrueNAS 12.0 Documentation is Improving

TrueNAS 12.0 has moved to a more modern documentation style that encourages contribution. The new documentation is more modular and expandable, but is not yet as complete and comprehensive as that of FreeNAS 11.3. Feel free to use both user guides while we complete the transition. Please check out the 12.0 documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. We’re grateful for all the contributions received thus far!

Storage Freedom with TrueNAS SCALE

One of the side benefits of the massive TrueNAS 12.0 and OpenZFS 2.0 work is TrueNAS SCALE. Last week we passed a milestone with the first version, TrueNAS SCALE 20.10 “Angelfish”. While it is based on 90% of the same software, SCALE is less mature but very promising. For most users, we recommend moving to TrueNAS 12.0 and OpenZFS 2.0. From there, users can stay with CORE or Enterprise editions or migrate in 2021 to SCALE for Linux services or scale-out functionality. We call this flexibility, “Storage Freedom”.

TrueNAS CORE: Still the Best Free NAS

We hope these TrueNAS 12.0 performance improvements have a positive impact on your FreeNAS systems. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on the community forums, on the TrueNAS subreddit, or in response to this blog. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, please email us.

TrueNAS 12.0 Upgrades are Easy

For those with FreeNAS 11.3 installed on your system, you can upgrade to TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE with a single click! Otherwise, download TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE to get started.
TrueNAS 12.0 can operate on all of the iXsystems platforms from the FreeNAS and TrueNAS Minis, to the power-efficient X-Series, all the way up to the flagship High availability (HA) M-Series. There is also a new R-Series product line that can run CORE, Enterprise, and SCALE editions of TrueNAS 12.0. A press release was also released yesterday on the TrueNAS R-Series and the first TrueNAS SCALE release.
For those with TrueNAS HA systems and support contracts, we recommended contacting iXsystems support to schedule an upgrade. We will verify your systems health, configuration, and support the upgrade process to minimize issues.

The post TrueNAS 12.0 is Released! appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

TrueNAS 12.0 RC1 was released yesterday and with it, TrueNAS CORE is ready for deployment. The merger of FreeNAS and TrueNAS into a unified software image can now begin its path into mainstream use. TrueNAS CORE is the new FreeNAS and is on schedule.

The TrueNAS 12.0 BETA process started in June and has been the most successful BETA release ever with more than 3,000 users and only minor issues. Ars Technica provided a detailed technical walkthrough of the original BETA. There is a long list of features and performance improvements. During the BETA process, TrueNAS 12.0 demonstrated over 1.2 Million IOPS and over 23GB/s on a TrueNAS M60.
TrueNAS 12.0 RC1 is suitable for less complex or other non-mission critical environments. Minor BETA issues have been fixed and several performance improvements to ZFS, SMB, iSCSI, and NFS have been integrated. Snapshot your pool, backup your data, and try it out! You can download it here.
In addition to the previously listed features, there are some other major additions:

• Zstandard Compression: A modern compression algorithm has been introduced in OpenZFS. This enables configuration of the compression level. It can provide gzip-like higher compression ratios, but closer to the read/write performance of the default LZ4 algorithm. We’ll be doing more performance testing to confirm the benefits.
• Enclosure Management for Minis: The TrueNAS Minis (fka FreeNAS Minis) have well-defined motherboards, wiring, and enclosures, which enables a graphical enclosure management function. Previously this was only available for the TrueNAS X and M-Series, but is now also available on the Minis. The Enclosure management function simplifies remote management by providing a graphical view of the drives, their status, and temperatures.
  

• TrueCommand Cloud Connections: TrueCommand Cloud is a SaaS offering of TrueCommand that leverages an integrated WireGuard VPN to connect to each TrueNAS system through firewalls. TrueNAS 12.0 RC1 is the first official release to support the TrueCommand Cloud functionality and enables us to begin offering TrueCommand Cloud trials to interested users and organizations. The TrueCommand icon that you see in the “action bar” at the top right of the WebUI can be used to easily establish a connection to your TrueCommand Cloud instance. TrueCommand Cloud is based on the current version, TrueCommand 1.3.1.

TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE in October

TrueNAS 12.0 is going through the same NIGHTLY, BETA1, BETA2, RC1, RELEASE, and UPDATE stages that FreeNAS has gone through. There is a TrueNAS 12.0 sub-forum on the Community forums for this unification process and Community feedback.
We appreciated the Community testing of the TrueNAS 12.0 BETA releases. TrueNAS 12.0 has also been tested on Enterprise HA systems (M-Series and X-Series) within our labs and is now ready for field testing.
We are looking forward to hearing about user experiences when updating to RC1. You can review the current bugs here. So far, we have hit all TrueNAS 12.0 schedule dates and expect the October RELEASE to be on schedule.

TrueNAS 12.0 Documentation is Maturing

The new TrueNAS 12.0 documentation is more modular and expandable. The Community is invited to edit and contribute. Please check out the documentation even if you don’t upgrade today.

TrueNAS CORE: Still the Best Free NAS

We hope these TrueNAS 12.0 performance improvements have a positive impact on your systems. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on the community forums, on the TrueNAS subreddit, or in response to this blog. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, please email us.
For those with FreeNAS 11.3 installed on your system, you can upgrade to TrueNAS 12.0 RC1 with a single click! Otherwise, download TrueNAS 12.0 RC1 and get started.

The post TrueNAS CORE is Ready for Deployment — Dive In! appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

TrueNAS 12.0 and OpenZFS 2.0 improvements include:

NUMA Improvements: With multiple CPUs in a system, there is a need to manage Non Uniform Memory Access (NUMA). TrueNAS 12.0 does a better job of assigning cores and memory, providing performance improvements for the M50 and other dual socket architectures.
ZFS Metadata on Flash: Special SSD vdevs can be used for Metadata acceleration. This can include both file systems metadata and dedupe tables. This is one of the core features of OpenZFS 2.0.
ZFS Fusion Pools: The special SSD vdevs can also be used for data based on I/O write size. This is configurable on a per dataset basis. Users can accelerate database datasets by configuring a higher I/O size.
ZFS Persistent L2ARC: L2ARC (flash-based read cache) is typically cleared on a controller reboot or failover. For smaller systems with less than a TB of L2ARC, that can be ok. For larger systems with 10TB of L2ARC, it may take hours or even days to rehydrate the L2ARC. The persistent L2ARC option avoids clearing the cache allowing performance sensitive systems to get back to full speed without delay.
ZFS async DMU and CoW: Within ZFS is a Data Management Unit (DMU) and an algorithm for Copy-on-Write (CoW). These algorithms were implemented in a synchronous manner which required a transaction to wait until another transaction was completed. iXsystems contributed to the conversion of these algorithms to an asynchronous approach which reduces the amount of wait time and increases parallelism in OpenZFS 2.0. An added benefit is that fewer disk I/Os are needed for sequential writes. This increases drive efficiency and reduces latency in heavy workloads.
ZFS Record Size Increases: One benefit of async CoW is that larger ZFS record sizes will perform better with fewer Read-Modify-Write activities. Instead of operating with 128KB record size, a 256KB or 512KB record size may be OK for some workloads. This will increase the bandwidth of many RAIDZ1/2/3 VDEVs.
ZFS Checksum Vectorization: ZFS protects data by writing a Checksum into metadata for each block of data written to disk. These checksums are then used for scrubbing the data and verifying every READ. The calculation of these checksums can be compute intensive. Vectorization uses the accelerated instructions found in many Intel processors to reduce compute overhead and free up valuable compute cycles for other tasks.
ZFS Asynchronous TRIM: OpenZFS 2.0 includes asynchronous automatic and manual trim capabilities. Manual Trims can be scheduled overnight or each weekend to provide more performance during business hours.
Faster ZFS Boot: OpenZFS 2.0 includes a more parallel process for importing a ZFS pool with many drives. This reduces boot and failover times by over 50% for larger systems.
ZFS Dedupe: ZFS deduplication performs well if all the dedupe metadata is in DRAM, but is painfully slow if the dedupe metadata ends up on HDDs. With the addition of Fusion Pools, the dedupe metadata can be assigned to the flash VDEVs and performance is improved. There is some ongoing testing to see how much faster it will be, but we expect significant progress.
In addition to the ZFS improvements, there have been some dramatic improvements in the performance of some key services:
iSCSI Reads: iXsystems has enhanced the iSCSI target software so that a memory copy between the Ethernet NIC and ZFS is removed. This improves the high end performance limits and allows greater than 1 Million IOPS and over 15GB/s to be achieved with the right hardware.
SMB Single Client Speed: The speed of a single SMB client is important for many applications including multimedia editing where the upload and download speeds for 4K and 8K video files is important. These speeds have been increased by >20% to over 2 Gigabytes per second.
SMB Multi-Client Capacity: The number of SMB clients that can be supported is important to large organizations. The number of SMB clients that can be supported on a high-end system has been increased by more than 50%.
NFS Single Client: The NFS target has been improved to reduce latency and increase the bandwidth of a single NFS client from less than 2GB/s to over 3GB/s.
On the TrueNAS Enterprise side with the M-Series platforms, we have been testing for a high-performance system and have added support for:
Multiple NVDIMMs: Each NVDIMM can be assigned as a Write SLOG for different pools. A single system can have an All-flash pool and a Fusion or Hybrid Pool with HDDs.
20GB/s PCIe Interconnect: For High Availability (HA) systems with dual controllers, we use a high-speed PCIe interconnect to provide low latency synchronization of WRITES. This high bandwidth interconnect reduces latency and increases WRITE bandwidth by 100%.
All of these performance improvements, plus advances in processor performance, contribute to the ability to build and support larger systems well beyond 10PB in size.

Progress toward TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE!

TrueNAS 12.0 is going through the same NIGHTLY, BETA1, BETA2, RC1, RELEASE, and UPDATE stages that FreeNAS has gone through. There is a TrueNAS 12.0 sub-forum on the Community forums for this unification process and Community feedback.
We appreciated the Community testing of the TrueNAS 12.0 BETA1 release. TrueNAS 12.0 BETA2 has also been tested on Enterprise HA systems within our labs. Please update to BETA2 and provide your feedback. Let us know whether you see the expected performance improvements. Bugs that are caught and reported early are going to have less impact on the final schedule.
TrueNAS 12.0 Documentation is Maturing
The new TrueNAS 12.0 documentation is more modular and expandable. The Community is invited to edit and contribute. Please check out the documentation even if you don’t upgrade today.
TrueNAS CORE: Still the Best Free NAS
We hope these TrueNAS 12.0 performance improvements have a positive impact on your systems. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on the community forums, on the TrueNAS subreddit, or in response to this blog. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, email us.
For those with FreeNAS 11.3 installed on your system, you can upgrade to TrueNAS 12.0 BETA with a single click! Otherwise, download TrueNAS 12.0 BETA2 and get started.

The post TrueNAS 12.0 BETA2 Showcases Performance Improvements appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

• • The first-boot phase of a TrueNAS CORE installation is the simplest OS installation we’ve ever seen.
    

• • Assuming you have all those things, the [Active Directory] domain join process in TrueNAS Core works lightning fast; it’s enormously faster than joining an actual Windows PC to the domain.
    

• • Creating a new share mapped to our dataset exposes some of TrueNAS’s best “easy mode” functionality—Windows ACLs (Access Control Lists) work right out of the box, meaning that adjusting file and folder permissions from File Explorer on Windows Clients will just work. Trying to get this right on a Linux system is just plain painful, so this is an important feature and a positive differentiator for TrueNAS and other systems which offer it.
    

• • FreeNAS, and now TrueNAS CORE, have come a long way in the past several years. TrueNAS CORE is an easy way for a home admin or hobbyist who’s a little nervous about the command line to maintain a truly robust, feature-rich ZFS storage server. It’s also good for potential TrueNAS Enterprise customers to get their feet wet with a free edition that looks just like what they’ll be working with if they pull the trigger on a commercial license.

TrueNAS CORE is still BETA

While the general quality of TrueNAS 12.0 BETA relative to 11.3 is still good, it is still BETA. Jim identified two bugs (NAS-106638, NAS-106665 – both have been resolved in the NIGHTLY images) and suggested several places where we could improve the web UI. We’ll be incorporating that feedback. He also highlighted that we added the new ZFS pool feature flag called log_spacemap.
There were some ACL challenges identified: “it’s not entirely clear which parts of the dialog apply to the global Unix permissions and which side apply to the inside of the actual ACLs—the two are entirely separate in reality but are jumbled together in a single dialog here.” On review, this happened because the dataset was set up as “generic” type which is Unix-style and not “SMB”. To avoid the issue, make sure datasets are created as “SMB”.
Pointing out the log_spacemap addition is very useful to the community. TrueNAS uses this feature to ensure performance is relatively stable as a ZFS pool fills up. The log_spacemap makes it easier for ZFS to find free disk space for new writes in a full and fragmented pool. As with any new ZFS feature, enabling this feature flag does not cause any replication issues, but may restrict the ability to import the pool on an older ZFS environment. The feature is optionally enabled on upgrade to 12.0 and should only be enabled once you’ve determined you will not be rolling back to a previous version of ZFS.
Some slight performance issues were identified which could be improved. Again, being BETA, we plan to address performance more systematically in the next version of TrueNAS 12.0 (BETA2) with some significant SMB and ZFS improvements.

Progress toward TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE!

TrueNAS 12.0 is still on schedule. The TrueNAS 12.0 BETA1 stage has had relatively few and minor issues and almost 10X more testing than 11.3 BETA. However, there are some significant ZFS and SMB performance changes being made that deserve another test cycle and so the next version will be called TrueNAS 12.0 BETA2 and will be available in mid-August.
The TrueNAS 12.0 sub-forum on the Community forums is the best place for Community information and feedback.
The new TrueNAS 12.0 documentation is more modular and expandable. The Community is invited to edit and contribute. Please check out the documentation even if you don’t upgrade today.
TrueNAS CORE, formerly “FreeNAS”, will still be the Best Free NAS. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, email us.
For those with FreeNAS 11.3 installed on your system, you can upgrade to TrueNAS 12.0 BETA with a single click! Otherwise, download TrueNAS 12.0 BETA and get started. Onward to BETA2!

The post TrueNAS CORE makes ZFS Easy appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

We are excited to announce that TrueNAS 12.0 BETA has hit both the target date and our quality goals. The BETA release has completed two full cycles of QA (the same as FreeNAS 11.3 RC1) and testing from almost 1,000 users. There are no high priority issues and we can now recommend that the Community can upgrade their FreeNAS 11.3 systems and start their TrueNAS 12.0 testing. Snapshot your pool, backup your data, and try it out. You can also download the TrueNAS 12.0 BETA if you’d prefer.

Along the way, we have refined the logos for TrueNAS. These logos are now in use for TrueNAS 12.0. There is also the option to use the classic FreeNAS icon in the web user interface.

TrueNAS 12.0 BETA is the 1st major deliverable of the FreeNAS/TrueNAS Unification process. This process has already brought several of the major expected benefits to life:

• Rapid Development: Unified images have accelerated software development.
• Improved Quality: Reduced development redundancy and unified QA has increased software quality.
• Earlier Hardware Enablement: TrueNAS 12.0 brings improved support for AMD EPYC / Ryzen platforms and enhanced NUMA support for more efficient CPU core handling. Tell us your stories!
• Simplified Documentation: The 1st release of the unified TrueNAS 12.0 documentation is now available and includes the capability for user contributions.
• Reduced Redundancy: We are now starting to produce unified web content and videos which refer to one software family without the need for duplication.
• Flexibility: Unified images enable simpler transitions or upgrades between editions.
• Resource efficiency: Software developers are freed to work on new features and related projects like TrueNAS SCALE.
• OpenZFS 2.0: The major investment in the development and integration of “OpenZFS 2.0” is paying off with advances like dataset encryption, major performance improvements, and compatibility with Linux ZFS pools which was needed for TrueNAS SCALE.

TrueNAS 12.0 Features

The master feature list for TrueNAS 12.0 is below. The features in black existed in FreeNAS 11.3 and are shared by both TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise. The features in blue have been added to TrueNAS 12.0. The column to the right displays features that are available in TrueNAS Enterprise only. TrueNAS 12.0 CORE has a superset of FreeNAS 11.3 features.

The feature additions for TrueNAS 12.0 have been summarized as:

• Metadata on Flash: Special SSD vdevs can be used for Metadata acceleration. This can include both file systems metadata and dedupe tables. This is one of the core features of OpenZFS 2.0.
• Fusion Pools: The special SSD vdevs can also be used for data based on I/O write size. This is configurable on a per dataset basis. Users can accelerate database datasets or special VMs.
• SSD Wear Monitoring: Any SSD (Boot, L2ARC, slog or vdev) can be monitored for wear and alerts created.
• Dataset Encryption: Specific datasets can be selected or deselected for encryption with a user-provided key. When replicating the dataset to another TrueNAS, the key does not have to be provided and so the data can be transmitted and stored in the original encrypted state.
• Asynchronous ZFS Trim: Trim commands free up space, particularly within SSDs. By making these Trim commands asynchronous, they scale and perform better. This is particularly useful for deduplication of flash storage and can significantly reduce costs.
• Faster ZFS Boot: OpenZFS 2.0 includes a more parallel process for importing a ZFS pool with many drives. This reduces boot and failover times.
• ZFS Linux Compatibility: Linux and FreeBSD are peer operating systems for OpenZFS 2.0. Compressed, deduplicated, and encrypted data can be efficiently replicated from a Linux host to a TrueNAS system for backup and archive. It is also possible to import a pool (drive set) from Linux to TrueNAS. This is being used to start the TrueNAS SCALE project which supports scale-out storage and hyperconvergence.
• Accelerated ZFS: Several performance improvements have been made to reduce both drive IOPS and the CPU cycles required.
• User Quota Support: Allows setting per-user storage quotas which are enforced by ZFS for both NFS and SMB shares. Users can be local or AD/LDAP.
• OpenVPN Client and Server: VPNs provide security for remotely accessing storage services, such as SMB or NFS, across the Internet. This feature enables the OpenVPN Client or Server to be included in the NAS for simpler administration and lower costs. The other end of the VPN connection can be any OpenVPN client, such as another NAS, Firewall Device, or Personal Desktop/Laptop.
• Two Factor Authentication: This ensures that a compromised root password cannot be used by itself to gain access to the administrator interface.
• API Keys: Access to the REST / WebSockets API can now be done via API keys which can be created and revoked directly via the WebUI for additional security.
• KMIP Support: Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) is an Enterprise feature for securing drives or datasets through a centralized key management system.
• TrueCommand Dataset Management: TrueCommand and TrueNAS are joined at the hip and will provide dataset monitoring in TrueCommand 1.3 (to be released in July).

Progress toward TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE!

TrueNAS 12.0 is scheduled to go through the same NIGHTLY, BETA, RC1, RELEASE, and UPDATE states that FreeNAS has gone through. There will be no changes to the software update process or the information available. There is a TrueNAS 12.0 sub-forum on the Community forums for this unification process and Community feedback. Over 700 users have been testing the NIGHTLY release with some great feedback.
We appreciate the Community testing of the TrueNAS 12.0 BETA release. Bugs that are caught and reported early are going to have less impact on the final schedule. TrueNAS 12.0 BETA will also be tested on Enterprise HA systems within our labs

.
New and Improved Documentation
The new TrueNAS 12.0 documentation is more modular and expandable. The Community is invited to edit and contribute. Please check out the documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. Below is a snapshot of the documentation site and its new user-friendly organization.

TrueNAS CORE: Still the Best Free NAS

But, don’t take it from us. StorageReview explained how many of the TrueNAS 12.0 features are integrated into the user interface. Ars Technica also reviewed TrueNAS 12.0 and the OpenZFS 2.0 improvements.
TrueNAS CORE 12.0 has the new logos included but will have the option to use a throwback FreeNAS theme. Below is the new TrueNAS theme.

TrueNAS CORE pictured with the new TrueNAS logo

We hope you are sharing our excitement for TrueNAS 12.0. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on the forums, or in response to this blog. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, email us.
For those with FreeNAS 11.3 installed on your system, you can upgrade to TrueNAS 12.0 BETA with a single click! Otherwise, download TrueNAS 12.0 BETA and get started.

The post Be One of the First to Test Drive TrueNAS 12.0 BETA appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

There was a time in history where all that mattered was an Operating System (OS) and the hardware it ran on — the “pre-software era”, if you will. Your hardware dictated the OS you used.
Once software applications became prominent, your hardware’s OS determined the applications you could run. Application vendors were forced to juggle the burden of “portability” between OS platforms, choosing carefully the operating systems they’d develop their software to. Then, there were the great OS Wars of the 1990s, replete with the rampant competition, licensing battles, and nasty lawsuits, which more or less gave birth to the “open source OS” era.
The advent of the hypervisor simultaneously gave way to the “virtual era” which set us on a path of agnosticism toward the OS. Instead of choosing from the applications available for your chosen OS, you could simply install another OS on the same hardware for your chosen application. The OS became nothing but a necessary cog in the stack.
TrueNAS open storage enables this “post-OS era” with support for storage clients of all UNIX flavors, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, MacOS, VMware, Citrix, and many others. Containerization has carried that mentality even further. An operating system, like the hardware that runs it, is now just thought of as part of the “infrastructure”.
So, which OS should TrueNAS use? There have been some comments in the press about our plans, so we thought it best to share a fuller picture.

Most are aware by now that we have decided to unify FreeNAS & TrueNAS into a single software image and brand: TrueNAS Open Storage. With the release of Version 12.0, what was previously called FreeNAS will now be TrueNAS CORE. What was formerly TrueNAS will now be TrueNAS Enterprise. Both of these TrueNAS editions use FreeBSD 12.0 as the base OS and it has been performing very well. Future development for these editions will continue on FreeBSD.

We also announced the start of a new Open Source project, called TrueNAS SCALE. The goals of this project include running Linux containers and building scale-out clustered storage. Because of these project goals, we chose Linux (Debian) as the base OS so that we had access to all of these container and clustering tools and could deliver a well-integrated user experience in a reasonable timeframe.
So, TrueNAS is now officially multi-OS. As ComputerWorld once said, “Welcome to the post-OS Era”.

Why Multi-OS?

The history of TrueNAS is FreeNAS and FreeBSD. FreeBSD is a well-structured OS with our preferred BSD license. It integrates well with ZFS and is well suited to the Open Storage business model that TrueNAS uses. The modularity, stability, and simplicity of FreeBSD are well known. This translates into simpler and easier to use software, particularly for a storage platform. Who doesn’t love that?

However, the marketplace winner for new applications is the Linux OS and Containers. Even Microsoft is embracing this reality. Whether you prefer Docker, LXC, or Kubernetes, the primary application platform for the next decade is containers and scale-out infrastructure. If application platforms will be simpler and cheaper by integrating Linux containers with ZFS storage, then who would not want that option?
The iXsystems Engineering Team looked at the choices and decided that being multi-OS was the right solution. It was better than picking one OS for all products and having to make major tradeoffs with respect to stability, continuity, market reach, and innovation. We also wanted to be more inclusive, broadening our community by inviting users and developers that are familiar with Linux. Therefore, being “multi-OS” gives our users and developers the best of both worlds:

1. Stability and reliability of our current TrueNAS CORE/Enterprise products by continuing to deliver them on FreeBSD.
2. Faster access to the foundational technologies required to make TrueNAS SCALE (containers, scale-out) into a best-in-class hyperconverged infrastructure.

The critical element of the system common to all TrueNAS editions is ZFS which has to secure, store, and manage data over many years and even decades. We also needed to invest in enabling TrueNAS as a multi-OS capable platform.

How did we enable Multi-OS?

Starting with the FreeNAS 11.1 code base from a couple of years ago, we have invested in the multi-OS transition with a few key initiatives:

• Middleware was updated to be OS independent and have clean REST and Web sockets APIs.
• Web user interface was modernized using Angular and the new APIs. It is also OS independent.
• Collaboration with Open Source component projects like Samba and rclone to ensure we would have portability of key components.
• Minimize use and exposure of Linux’s systemd and FreeBSD’s rc.d.
• OpenZFS 2.0 integration of FreeBSD and Linux so that data and pools could be migrated easily between OSes.
• QA/testing infrastructure built so that we could test all editions with the same tests.

What developers will find is that apart from the OS, over 90% of TrueNAS software is shared between the CORE, Enterprise, and SCALE editions. More importantly for users, improvements to one edition will generally be shared and available for the other editions.

What is the impact on TrueNAS users?

For users, nothing… except for more rapid development of new features and solutions. There will be more choices in the future, but we assume there are no objections to that!
For Linux developers, there will be new opportunities to contribute to the Open Source TrueNAS SCALE project. We aim to make it a very well coordinated and managed environment to develop the best Open Hyperconverged Infrastructure. We’ll be calling for contributors soon.
If you have any additional questions or need advice on a new project, please email us at info@iXsystems.com. We are standing by to help.

The post TrueNAS is Multi-OS appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Thank you for removing ‘Free’ from the name

Specifically, there were a number of comments from community members thanking us for removing “Free” from the name, because it removed a stigma held by their peers, colleagues, or bosses that a product with “Free” in the name couldn’t also be of high quality or fit for business use. “I can finally look my boss in the eye when he asks what storage we are using in the lab” is a paraphrase of one such comment. Of course, comments like this were a little tough to hear about a name we held so dearly for so long, but it was awesome feedback to receive because it reinforced one of the major reasons we decided to unify the brands as TrueNAS in the first place.
If you’re reading this, you likely already know that FreeNAS is far more than just a free NAS. You likely already know that it is powerful, enterprise software defined storage. Since many of us use it in homelabs, you know that it automatically gets lumped in with low-end NAS systems and you might take offense when it gets compared to Synology or QNAP systems instead of Netapp or EMC. You know these things already, but it’s clear that not everybody does…yet. And, if you think back, it probably took you a while to get there, and the name “FreeNAS” likely didn’t help the cause. And, if we’re totally honest with ourselves, the shark didn’t make things any easier.
We want all users, old and new, to have full confidence in deploying TrueNAS CORE. It’s important to us that you can look your boss in the eye when he asks what storage you’re using in the lab. And, when you prove how successful that’s been, we want you to have that same confidence when you recommend TrueNAS Enterprise once it’s time to replace those overpriced Netapp or EMC arrays. And, we want to make sure everything we do down to our logo helps you make that case.

We’ve Gone Full Corporate

We say that in jest, of course. iXsystems was founded on the principles of “being different”. We embraced open source long before it was ever cool or mainstream. We develop in the open. We try to be as transparent as we can in all we do. We built an enterprise storage product and made it free when everyone else thought we were crazy, and now FreeNAS is the world’s most popular storage software. We have fought hard to keep this identity of being different from the rest of the industry.
Of course, behind that philosophy also exists a very serious company focused on building innovating, high-quality products, world class customer support, and outstanding customer experience. We understand that our desire to be different can’t ever get in the way of you getting your job done, and this extends to the impression our brand makes.

The Abstract Shark Fin?

So, we solicited the help of an outside design agency and started looking at other logomark designs entirely but ultimately came back to playing around with the shark fin: refining it, tweaking it, making it abstract. After all, we couldn’t lose that soul of the product entirely, right? So, during that part of the process, we ended up creating two sharks that were vertical mirror images of one another that once put together sort of formed a cool looking box (some said “shark tank” or “aquarium”). After initially chuckling at the similarity to the box references in the show “Silicon Valley”, we thought, “Ok, this does look pretty cool….box….storage, container…what if the box was open to represent the concept of “open storage”? That looks cool! What if we stacked the boxes for the TrueNAS Enterprise logo to represent the extra protection that comes with high-availability? And, what if we put four boxes side by side to represent TrueNAS SCALE? Wait…..what’s TrueNAS SCALE you ask? Oh, just a little thing we’re working on in the background 🙂 More to come on that soon!
Ok, ok, enough blabbing. Without further ado, we’re proud to unveil the monochrome version of the new TrueNAS CORE, TrueNAS Enterprise, and TrueNAS SCALE logos, we’ve lovingly dubbed “the shark tanks” or “shark boxes”.

Color is in the works, but we couldn’t wait any longer to show you since it’s going to start appearing in TrueNAS 12 nightlies as soon as this week!
We’re excited with what’s coming in TrueNAS 12, not least of which is this sharp new logo, that will hopefully send you marching into your boss’s office first thing tomorrow morning, look her dead in the eye and say, “we’re replacing all of our storage with TrueNAS.”
If you ever need our assistance in doing that, simply fill out a brief questionnaire or email us at info@iXsystems.com. We are standing by to help.

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In this tutorial, we’ll cover the basics of iSCSI, configuring iSCSI on FreeNAS (soon to be TrueNAS CORE), and setting up access from a Windows machine. A ZVOL, which is another type of dataset, is required to connect with iSCSI for block storage. One benefit of using iSCSI on TrueNAS is that Windows systems backed up with iSCSI get the ZFS rollback feature to quickly recover from CryptoLocker, ransomware, and data loss. This tutorial assumes that you have configured a ZFS Pool.

What is iSCSI?

iSCSI is a protocol standard that allows the consolidation of storage data. iSCSI is implemented in TrueNAS to act like a Storage Area Network (SAN) over an existing Ethernet network.

• Specifically, iSCSI exports disk devices or “targets” over an Ethernet network that iSCSI clients or “initiators” can attach to and mount.
• iSCSI can be used over an existing Ethernet network, although dedicated networks can be built for iSCSI traffic for higher performance.
• Interestingly, SAN environments built on Fibre Channel can be expanded using iSCSI. iSCSI was designed with Ethernet in mind, but it works just as well with fiber. So it can be a cost-effective alternative add-on for existing fiber setups.
• iSCSI also provides an advantage in an environment that uses Windows shell programs; these programs tend to filter “Network Location” but iSCSI mounts are not filtered.

Basic Information

Before configuring iSCSI on your TrueNAS system, you should be familiar with the following iSCSI terminology:

• Initiator is a client that has authorized access to the storage data on the TrueNAS system. The client requires initiator software in order to initiate the connection to the iSCSI share–TARGET. ** Note that not all connections are authorized.
• Target is a storage resource on the TrueNAS system that is shared with an initiator. Every target has a unique name known as an iSCSI Qualified Name (IQN).
• Extent is the storage unit to be shared. It can be in the form of a file or a device EXTENT, that is provided as an iSCSI target.
• CHAP, or Challenge-Handshake Authentication Protocol, is an authentication method that uses a shared secret and three-way authentication to determine if a system is authorized to access the storage device and to periodically confirm that the session has not been hijacked by another system. In iSCSI, the initiator (client) performs the CHAP authentication.
• Mutual CHAP is a superset of CHAP in that both ends of the communication authenticate to each other.

Creating a ZVOL

The first step to configure iSCSI is to create a ZVOL for our device extent. A ZVOL is a type of dataset available in our ZFS pool. The iSCSI Wizard also allows you to create a ZVOL or dataset, which we will talk about later.
Go to “Storage” → “Pools”, open the Pool options by clicking the three dots on the right of your pool, then “Add Zvol”.

• Enter a name and size for the ZVOL then click “SAVE“.

Configuring iSCSI

Now we will go ahead and configure iSCSI on a TrueNAS system.
On your TrueNAS machine, from the left side menu, select “Sharing” → Block Shares (iSCSI) → “Target Global Configuration”.

• Review the target global configuration parameters.
• You do not have to modify this, but remember that this is the base name that your targets will be associated with.

The iSCSI Wizard will help you easily create the block share with its step by step configuration. Let’s go ahead and click “Wizard”.
Give your iSCSI share a name.

• For “Type”, select this based on your dataset type. If you have configured a normal dataset from your pool, choose “File”.
• Otherwise, choose “Device” and you will be able to choose the ZVOL you created earlier, or create a ZVOL if you didn’t already. Click “Create New”, then browse to the path of your Pool.
• Set the device size limit. We recommend not using more than 80% of available capacity. * More information can be found in the documentation.
• Under “What are you using this for”, choose the entry that matches your use case. Since we’ll be connecting with Windows Server, we’ll choose “Modern OS”.

• Click “NEXT” to move into the Portal section. Since you don’t have a Portal created yet, the default option is “Create New”.
• If you want to enable security authentication, choose “CHAP” for “Discovery Auth Method” and fill out the Group ID, User, and Secret fields. The Secret must be between 12 and 16 characters.
• You can leave the IP as “0.0.0.0” which is the wildcard address of the interface.

• Click “NEXT” to move on to the Initiator section. You can leave the Initiators and Authorized Networks field blank, unless you want to limit access to specific initiator clients or IPs on your network.

• Click “NEXT” and review your Wizard settings, then “SUBMIT”. The wizard should automatically associate your Extent with your Target.

Enable iSCSI Service

Click “Services” from the left menu and make sure iSCSI service is “Running”. Check the “Start Automatically” box to start iSCSI after every reboot.

Access Data on iSCSI share from Windows

In order to access the data on the iSCSI share, clients will need to use iSCSI Initiator software. An iSCSI Initiator client is pre-installed in Windows 7 to 10 Pro, and Windows Server 2008, 2012, and 2019. Please note that Windows Professional Edition is typically required.

• Click the Start Menu and search for the “iSCSI Initiator”.
• Go to the “Configuration” tab and click “Change” to change the iSCSI initiator to the same name you created earlier, which was “iscsishare”.

• Go to the “Discovery Tab”, proceed to “Discover Portal”, and type in your FreeNAS or TrueNAS IP address. Leave the port at 3260.

• If you set up CHAP earlier, click “Advanced Settings”, and then check “Enable CHAP log on”, then enter your initiator name and the same target/secret you set earlier on TrueNAS; otherwise, move to the next step.
• Go back to “Targets” and click “Connect” on your iSCSI target, then click “OK”.

• Search for and open the “Disk Management” app in your Control Panel.
• A new window will ask you to format the drive. Your drive should currently be ”unallocated”. Complete the Wizard to format it and assign it a drive letter and name.

• Go to This PC or My Computer and your new iSCSI volume should show up under the list of drives. You should now be able to add, delete, and modify files and folders on your iSCSI drive.

Thank you for reading through this tutorial! Be sure to check out our other tutorial videos on our YouTube channel, and don’t forget to comment, like, and subscribe. Don’t forget to click the “notification bell” to receive alerts on new videos.

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We are making some changes to the FreeNAS and TrueNAS bug tracker that’ll give you yet another way to help contribute and democratize enterprise storage!

As many of you know, we’ve historically had three ticket types available in our tracker: Bugs, Features, and Improvements, which are all fairly self-explanatory. After some discussion internally, we’ve decided to implement a new type of ticket, a “Suggestion”. These will be replacing Feature and Improvement requests for the TrueNAS Community, simplifying things down to two options: Bugs and Suggestions. This change also introduces a slightly different workflow than before.

One issue we’ve had in the past with Features and Improvements is that just about all the ideas submitted have been “good” ideas. The challenge was determining which ideas were “best” or most desired by the community, which at times made it difficult for engineers to determine which ought to be integrated into our development roadmap.

Just because we think something is a “good” idea, or a community member submits a well-laid out feature request, we didn’t have a great way of determining how many people are interested. This made the process of picking and choosing too arbitrary. To address this, the Suggestion ticket has been created to help us better gauge interest in particular requests by implementing the concept of “voting” into the workflow:

As demonstrated above, we’re going to be looking to the community to help “Vote” on issues to provide an indication to our team what kind of interest there is for any particular idea. Once a Suggestion has reached the vote threshold (10 votes for the time being), we will then put it into a Review state, and then make a determination of if/when it should land on our TrueNAS roadmap.

So, how do you vote for a Suggestion? Easy! Simply login to our ticket system, find your issue, and click the “Vote for this issue” link on the top right of each ticket. If you can’t find a Suggestion that addresses your issue, create a Suggestion and let us know why it’s important to you.

The rest is up to you! To help create interest or garner more support for your own suggestions, you can solicit your Suggestion requests here on the community forums, social media, Reddit, email campaigns to friends and colleagues, etc.

Democratizing storage requires collaboration, and we’re expecting that this new process will allow us to be more responsive to the needs and wants of our community and prioritize changes to the product accordingly.
Thanks for reading, and as always, feedback is welcome!

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We have previously announced the merger of FreeNAS and TrueNAS into a unified software image and new naming convention. FreeNAS is becoming TrueNAS CORE. TrueNAS is becoming TrueNAS Enterprise. We’ve appreciated all of the positive feedback tremendously but noticed there were a few common questions from some of our more skeptical community members or ones that haven’t yet worked closely with iXsystems:
Will TrueNAS CORE still be open source and free?  
The answer is 100% yes.
Will TrueNAS CORE have fewer features than FreeNAS?  
The answer is 100% no. In fact, TrueNAS CORE will have MORE features than FreeNAS does today.
Will any “free” features now only be made available in TrueNAS Enterprise?
Nope. We have no intention of removing features from TrueNAS CORE. Hopefully, we’ve eased your minds. 🙂

Before we dive in and illustrate further the points above by comparing the features of FreeNAS, TrueNAS CORE, and TrueNAS Enterprise, let’s first do a quick recap of the benefits the FreeNAS/TrueNAS Unification plan delivers for all users and contributors:

• Rapid Development: Unified images accelerate software development and releases (for example, 12.0 is a major release that would normally have taken 9-12 months to release, and with these new efficiencies, we are bringing that closer to six months)
• Improved Quality: Reduced development redundancy and unified QA increases software quality and allows us to streamline testing
• Earlier Hardware Enablement: Staying in-sync with upstream OS versions will be easier, allowing earlier access to newer hardware drivers. For instance, 12.0 brings improved support for AMD EPYC / Ryzen platforms and enhanced NUMA support for more efficient CPU core handling.
• Simplified Documentation: Unified documentation eliminates redundancy such as separate user guides
• Reduced Redundancy: Unified web content and videos refer to one software family without the need for duplication
• Flexibility: Unified images enable simpler transitions or upgrades between editions
• Resource efficiency: Frees up developers to work on new features and related products
• OpenZFS 2.0: The planning for the “unified” 12.0 release began over a year ago and included the major investment in the development and integration of what will soon be released as “OpenZFS 2.0”. This effort is fast-forwarding delivery of advances like dataset encryption, major performance improvements, and compatibility with Linux ZFS pools. 

In a nutshell: huge efficiency gains equal higher quality software, released faster.

TrueNAS CORE Features

FreeNAS 11.3 has a very rich set of features, and TrueNAS CORE adds incrementally and significantly to that list. Again, no features are being harmed in the transition to TrueNAS CORE :-). In fact, “CORE” is an acronym that makes a commitment to our community that all the core functionality that FreeNAS users love will always be included in TrueNAS CORE, the best free NAS software (see what we did there?). 

The comprehensive feature list for TrueNAS 12.0 is actually quite enormous. To make it manageable, we’ve created a master feature list below. The features in black were existent in FreeNAS 11.3 and are shared by both TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise. The features in blue are new features being added with TrueNAS 12.0. The column to the right displays features that are available in TrueNAS Enterprise only. As you can see, no existing FreeNAS features have been moved over to the Enterprise column.

TrueNAS Enterprise has additional features that are needed for deployment in production applications. Many of these features are tied to the ability to support High Availability (HA) systems. 
By default, all new TrueNAS 12.0 features are included in both TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise. The feature additions for TrueNAS 12.0 can be summarized as:

Metadata on Flash: Special SSD vdevs can be used for Metadata acceleration. This can include both file systems metadata and dedupe tables. This is one of the core features of OpenZFS 2.0.
Fusion Pools: The special SSD vdevs can also be used for data based on I/O write size. This is configurable on a per dataset basis.  Users can accelerate database datasets or special VMs.
SSD Wear Monitoring: Any SSD (Boot, L2ARC, slog or vdev) can be monitored for wear and alerts created.
Dataset Encryption: Specific datasets can be selected or deselected for encryption with a user-provided key. When replicating the dataset to another TrueNAS, the key does not have to be provided and so the data can be transmitted and stored in the original encrypted state.
Asynchronous ZFS Trim: Trim commands free up space, particularly within SSDs. By making these Trim commands asynchronous, they scale and perform better. This is particularly useful for deduplication of flash storage and can significantly reduce costs.
Faster ZFS Boot: OpenZFS 2.0 includes a more parallel process for importing a ZFS pool with many drives. This reduces boot and failover times.
ZFS Linux Compatibility: Linux and FreeBSD are peer operating systems for OpenZFS 2.0. Compressed, deduplicated, and encrypted data can be efficiently replicated from a Linux host to a TrueNAS system for backup and archive. It is also possible to import a pool (drive set) from Linux to TrueNAS.
Accelerated ZFS: Several performance improvements have been made to reduce both drive IOPS and the CPU cycles required. More features and higher performance together is a big win for ZFS users :-).
OpenVPN Client and Server: VPNs provide security for remotely accessing storage services, such as SMB or NFS, across the Internet. This feature enables the OpenVPN Client or Server to be included in the NAS for simpler administration and lower costs. The other end of the VPN connection can be any OpenVPN client, such as another NAS, Firewall Device, or Personal Desktop/Laptop.  
Two Factor Authentication: For increased security, two factor authentication is highly desirable. TrueNAS ensures that a compromised root password cannot be used by itself to gain access to the administrator interface.
API Keys: Access to the REST / WebSockets API can now be done by API key. Keys can be created and revoked directly via the WebUI for additional security.
KMIP Support: Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) is an enterprise approach to securing systems and data through a centralized key management system. This feature will be available in TrueNAS Enterprise to secure drives or datasets. 
TrueCommand Dataset Management: TrueCommand is joined at the hip with TrueNAS and will provide some exciting features, including snapshotting, replicating, and migrating datasets between systems.
There should be something for everybody in this list. We hope you’re as excited by the increase in productivity as our devs are!

Onward to TrueNAS CORE!

TrueNAS 12.0 will go through the same NIGHTLY, ALPHA (Internal), BETA, RC1, RELEASE, UPDATE states that FreeNAS has gone through. There will be no changes to the software update process or the information available. There is a TrueNAS 12.0 sub-forum on the community forums for this unification process and community feedback. 
The TrueNAS CORE 12.0 nightly builds have reached a stage where they are largely “feature complete”. Some UI polish and a lot of testing is needed to get to RELEASE deployment quality. We appreciate developers and testers who work with these early images. Bugs that are caught and reported early are going to have less impact on the final schedule.

Still the Best Free NAS

Still open, still free, just with more features and a new brand. Nothing much will change in the UI dashboard. However, TrueNAS CORE will have the option to use a FreeNAS theme for those as attached to the FreeNAS name as we are!

TrueNAS CORE pictured with the “FreeNAS theme” for diehards and nostalgists alike!
We hope you are sharing in the excitement for TrueNAS CORE & Enterprise as we move closer to our release date. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on the forums or in response to this blog. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, email us. In the meantime, download FreeNAS 11.3 today in preparation, and you can later upgrade to TrueNAS CORE 12.0 with a single click!

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