With over 7,000 users providing valuable feedback and bug reports, Fangtooth BETA and RC.1 were a success thanks to the efforts of the testers and early adopters in the TrueNAS community. Today’s RELEASE version is ready for users to deploy the new feature set and experience the improved performance of its unified code base.

Built on the Mature Foundation of Electric Eel

TrueNAS 25.04 builds on the widely adopted TrueNAS 24.10 “Electric Eel” which delivered both integrated Docker support and significantly improved performance over TrueNAS 13.0. TrueNAS 24.10 is currently recommended for Enterprise users, in use by the majority of the TrueNAS Community, and is by far the most popular TrueNAS version in history.
While the recent TrueNAS 24.10.2.1 hot patch fixed a small number (5) of outstanding issues, TrueNAS 25.04 provides a much larger feature update with over 1,000 improvements,approximately 160 bug fixes, and multiple feature enhancements. For further details, see the Fangtooth introduction blog and TrueNAS release notes.

For our TrueCommand users looking to centrally administer Fangtooth systems, please ensure that you upgrade to TrueCommand 3.1 first before upgrading any systems to TrueNAS 25.04.

Fangtooth Unification is Delivered

Fangtooth builds on the combined capabilities of both TrueNAS CORE and SCALE. As Fangtooth matures, CORE and SCALE will unify into a common Community Edition and Enterprise version. Fangtooth introduces a number of new features, including:
Linux Kernel 6.12 featuring improved and extended hardware support

Fast Deduplication offers significant data footprint reduction on the all-NVMe TrueNAS H30 and F100 to help slash your virtualization infrastructure costs

5X Acceleration of the RAID-Z expansion process lets you make use of added capacity with less wait

LXC containers & QEMU/KVM Virtualization via Incus “instances”. LXC provides a lightweight functionality similar to Jails on CORE, while the updated VM layer includes Secure Boot support for operating systems requiring a TPM device. This feature is currently marked as “experimental.” In general, Incus greatly improves the virtualization capabilities of TrueNAS, but is marked as “experimental” while it matures.

Configurable IP addresses for newly added Apps in the catalog are available. All existing Apps will have this support added by June 1st. Current TrueNAS 24.04 users should migrate to 24.10 or later by this date to take advantage of the automated Apps migration process.

TrueNAS Enterprise Extensions

Improved Security (GPOS STIG) with additional logging and auditing. Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) are used to support Defense-grade government security with many of the same capabilities used to secure Enterprises.
RDMA Extensions for iSCSI (iSER) and NFS improve latency and IOPS by as much as 50% and are used for virtualization and analytics.

iSCSI Block Cloning accelerates VMware clusters and virtualization workloads like VM cloning by 10X

Fast File Copy accelerates SMB workloads that copy files by 10X

Fibre Channel support for Enterprise SANs. This also enables FC for high performance NVMe storage on TrueNAS F-Series, allowing the same TrueNAS unit to support FC, iSCSI, and NFS/SMB from a single appliance.

NFS access to snapshot directories makes it easier for end users to restore changed or deleted files without burdening storage admins.

Select TrueNAS Enterprise appliances with the new features of TrueNAS 25.04 can be ordered today. These enhancements will be recommended as an update for current Enterprise customers in Q2 2025.

For more information about these features and other Enterprise benefits, including up to 24×7 support, connect with a TrueNAS product specialist to discuss available options.

When Should I Update?

If you are deploying a new TrueNAS system, we recommend TrueNAS 24.10.2.1 for its maturity, broad hardware support, expanded App catalog, better performance, and improved Web UI, all of which make managing TrueNAS easier.
TrueNAS 25.04.0 adds to this and is recommended for Early adopters only. Later blogs will document specific features and performance measurements.

Current TrueNAS 13.x users looking for the new capabilities outlined above can migrate to TrueNAS 25.04, preserving data and essential NAS functionality such as SMB, NFS, iSCSI, and VM images. Once migrated, Docker and LXC can be set up to provide 3rd party Application services.

If you are a conservative user, we recommend waiting for a recommendation to upgrade. For current software recommendations, always review the Software Status page for recommendations based on your profile.

Join the TrueNAS Community

Whether you’re looking to deploy TrueNAS 25.04 or help shape the future of TrueNAS, now is the perfect time to engage with our growing community. Download your copy of TrueNAS Community Edition today and join thousands of users already benefiting from True Data Freedom. Visit the TrueNAS Community Forums or connect with us on social media to share your experiences and insights.

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The TrueNAS Engineering team has made significant contributions to OpenZFS 2.3.0, with a pre-release version of OpenZFS 2.3 integrated into TrueNAS 24.10 (Electric Eel). This version has performed well and stood up to the standard of reliability set by OpenZFS. Customers can use Electric Eel today if they want several of these OpenZFS 2.3 features and the stability it offers.

The current development version of TrueNAS, Fangtooth, aligns with the OpenZFS 2.3.0 release. Fangtooth will use this version of OpenZFS throughout its version lifecycle. This blog outlines the current status of the full set of OpenZFS features in the upcoming release.

Fast Dedupe Delivers Good Performance

Deduplication is highly desirable for many workloads, including virtualization and several file storage use cases. Where there is naturally a high ratio of redundant data within a pool, deduplication effectively increases not only the usable capacity of the drives, but also the efficiency of the ZFS Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC) and Level 2 ARC (L2ARC).

To improve the performance for deduplication, the new Fast Dedupe capability was co-developed by TrueNAS and Klara Systems. Internal testing of Fast Dedupe has shown very positive results and confirmed the expected performance. Reads of unique data are largely unimpacted by dedupe, with reads of duplicate data being significantly more likely to be served by the primary ARC. Writes experience a reduction in performance compared to a system without deduplication, approximately 60% slower overall, due to the overhead of hashing and indexing the contents for later comparison and data reduction.

Fast Dedupe performs very well with NVMe drives (which are extremely fast by default) and we will be making this technology available on our F-Series and H-Series NVMe platforms with Fangtooth. With 21 NVMe drives (arranged as 4 x 5wZ1) and fast dedupe, TrueNAS performance was better than a comparable unit with 240 mirrored HDDs.

RAIDZ Expansion has been accelerated

A much-anticipated feature for smaller systems and home users of TrueNAS, RAIDZ expansion allows a small pool (e.g., a single RAIDZ vdev) to be gradually expanded with one drive at a time. Existing data is preserved with its original parity level and rewritten across all drives, while new data is written with the new parity configuration. This simplified administrative process gives smaller TrueNAS systems the flexibility to expand in single drive increments, rather than adding a full vdev of drives. The same expansion feature works regardless of the parity level used – RAIDZ1, Z2, or Z3 – but cannot migrate between protection levels.

The TrueNAS team helped sponsor and complete RAIDZ expansion in OpenZFS.

Many systems have tested this feature with Electric Eel. Because the process of rebalancing requires reflowing the existing data, the expansion often took days on an HDD-based pool. Our engineering team recognized that the reflow algorithms could be improved and have submitted a patch into the final OpenZFS 2.3.0 which typically accelerates this process by 5X, with potential gains up to 10X. TrueNAS Fangtooth will include this feature.

What else is in Fangtooth?

In addition to the major features highlighted above, TrueNAS 25.04 includes much more. At this stage of development, the NVMe Direct IO is not yet validated or activated. In addition, the ability to assign Apps to unique IP addresses or interfaces is in process, but will not be testable until the App catalogs are updated with the Fangtooth BETA release, currently targeted for February 2025.

For more details, see the Release Notes and join the discussion on the TrueNAS Forums, where early testers of the 25.04 pre-release versions are sharing their feedback and tips.

TrueNAS 25.04 “Fangtooth” is planned for formal release in April 2025, and will support upgrades from existing TrueNAS 24.10 installations. Get started today with the free TrueNAS Community Edition, and easily upgrade to Fangtooth upon release.

Want to learn more about TrueNAS solutions in your business? Contact us to speak to a product specialist and find out how to harness the power of open Enterprise storage.

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