The post TrueNAS Fangtooth Bares its Teeth appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

The post Fangtooth Unification Begins appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

For TrueNAS, the two teeth of the Fangtooth fish represent CORE and SCALE, combining together with the goal of unifying both CORE and SCALE versions into the common TrueNAS Community Edition (CE). TrueNAS “Fangtooth” will be an upgrade for both SCALE 24.10 and CORE 13.x users, introducing new features for both Community and Enterprise users.

TrueNAS Fangtooth (aka TrueNAS 25.04) nightly images are available for developers, and the BETA1 version is expected to be ready in February. Bug fixes, feature updates, and ongoing polishing will continue until the targeted release date in April 2025.

Where TrueNAS Began Its Swim

TrueNAS CORE is the original successor of FreeNAS based on the FreeBSD Operating System. With the introduction of TrueNAS SCALE in 2022, modern Linux capabilities were introduced to TrueNAS, enabling adoption by a much larger and still rapidly growing community.

We were realistic that SCALE would not be as mature and polished as CORE for many software versions, so SCALE was initially created as a fork of CORE, with each version continuing their development, bug fixes and security updates independently. CORE 13.x has been in sustaining mode for the last 18 months and received its latest major update in November, to reach 13.0-U6.

Achieving Parity and Building Upon Success

As of October 2024, roughly equal numbers of SCALE and CORE users exist. SCALE is continuing to grow at a rapid rate, having doubled in system count over the past year, and CORE is declining slowly as users migrate to SCALE.

TrueNAS 24.04 “Dragonfish” achieved parity in storage quality with 13.x, and 24.10 “Electric Eel” added a better Apps infrastructure based on Docker while retaining all the storage quality benefits. With OpenZFS features such as RAIDZ expansion and improved performance, 24.10 is now superior in many dimensions to 13.x and has the most users of any release. We expect TrueNAS SCALE 24.10.1 will see even higher adoption among Enterprise users.

However, there are a few capabilities (discussed later) in CORE that Electric Eel does not provide. Fangtooth addresses these issues and enables it to be the upgrade path for both CORE and SCALE users alike. Fangtooth is the new, unified Community Edition.

The benefits of re-unification will be enormous for the community, both users and developers. Before the end of 2025, we expect the following to be true:

Most TrueNAS users will be on Fangtooth. The community experience will be streamlined, benefiting users by allowing them to share a common software base.

New features and security patches will be on a single, unified TrueNAS version, simplifying the process for users and developers. Features, APIs, and UIs will not diverge. Engineering, quality assurance, and support resources will ensure that the common version meets all users’ functional and stability needs.

The TrueNAS community will be larger, and satisfaction with the software and documentation will be higher. The TrueNAS business will also get stronger with increased resources and accelerated new features.

Fangtooth Bridges the Feature Gap

Fangtooth not only unifies CORE and SCALE, but also introduces a variety of new features to TrueNAS that improve performance, security, and scalability for both users and developers. The most notable of these new capabilities are:

TrueNAS Versioned API:  This allows third parties to use APIs to control TrueNAS, knowing that future versions of TrueNAS will honor the same API schemas. TrueNAS can evolve and improve in a more organized manner, allowing external tools to run with longer stability. Future versions of TrueCommand can more easily maintain better system longevity. User-Linked API Tokens are also included to provide secure and restricted management.

Fast Dedup: This feature is experimental in Electric Eel and is undergoing additional testing to be ready for production use. The significant reduction in storage media costs can benefit many use cases.

iSCSI Block Cloning:  Virtualization solutions can benefit from using iSCSI XCOPY commands to efficiently and rapidly copy data.

Upgraded Containerization & Virtualization: TrueNAS further improves its virtualization capabilities with the integration of Incus support, and an upgraded WebUI with support for native LXC containers.

Upgraded Linux Kernel: By upgrading to Linux kernel 6.12 LTS, Fangtooth will have updated support for new hardware. This will be an advantage for both CORE and SCALE users upgrading their hardware.

Apps with Configurable IP addresses: Apps in Electric Eel use TrueNAS’s host IP address. Fangtooth enables IP alias addresses to be created and assigned to one or more Apps.

Fangtooth bridges the gap between CORE and SCALE by bringing features new to SCALE users, but equivalent to CORE 13.x features.

LXC Containers:  LXC is the next generation of Linux Sandbox and a natural evolution for those coming from FreeBSD Jails. These will also be managed via Incus and provide  a consistent UI for LXC and  traditional VMs. Like Jails, there is efficient use of RAM and the ability to allocate a separate IP address. Within an LXC, there can be a full Linux instance and a Docker/Kubernetes engine. Tools like Dockge and Portainer can be used. You can see an early demonstration of the Incus management in TrueNAS on the TrueNAS Tech Talk (T3) Podcast – Episode 8

Fangtooth takes TrueNAS Enterprise appliances to the next level with features enabling Enterprises to build more secure, scalable, and performant solutions:

Improved Security (STIG): Additional work on logging and auditing will take TrueNAS to the next level in government security compliance and robustness.

NFS over RDMA: The performance needs of applications increase with data size, compute speed, and cluster size. NFS over RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) increases bandwidth and CPU efficiency on clients and the TrueNAS systems.

Veeam Fast Clone: Veeam data movers can use SMB COPY commands to accelerate specific actions and improve general performance. TrueNAS is working with Veeam to better integrate solutions for Enterprise users.

Fibre Channel: FC storage has been supported on Enterprise 13.x for over 5 years, and with its addition to Fangtooth, Enterprise users not only have a migration and upgrade path, but existing customers searching for Fibre Channel storage for their existing SAN will be able to choose from our full line of solutions, including the powerful TrueNAS F-Series.  The same LUNs can be accessed via FC or iSCSI and backed up through True Cloud backup.

Systems upgraded from CORE to Fangtooth will also be more secure and perform better. Most users prefer the modernized UI and the addition of the global UI search capability. More information on Fangtooth will be made available prior to the BETA.

When Should I Migrate?

If you are deploying a new TrueNAS system, we recommend TrueNAS SCALE 24.10 for added functionality, vastly broader hardware support, an expanded App catalog, better performance on most workloads, and an improved Web UI, all of which make managing TrueNAS easier than ever.

TrueNAS 13.0 users looking for the new capabilities outlined above can upgrade to TrueNAS 24.10 at any time, preserving data and essential NAS functionality such as SMB, NFS, iSCSI, and VMs – the primary exception being Jails. Jails can be manually migrated to 24.10 using Linux Sandboxes and either Dockge or Portainer. For those interested in the full set of unified features, Fangtooth will provide even better tools (e.g., LXC) for Jail-like functionality while avoiding the security concerns of iocage.

Fangtooth is completing an internal ALPHA and is available as a Nightly image for development and testing. We anticipate that Fangtooth BETA testing will start in February, and the Fangtooth RELEASE version in April would be the earliest for any significant upgrades.  By July 2025, we expect Fangtooth to be recommended to Enterprise users.

For current software recommendations, always review the Software Status page for recommendations based on your profile.

Join the TrueNAS Community

Whether you’re interested in deploying the existing TrueNAS 24.10 or helping shape the future of TrueNAS 25.04, there’s never been a better time to join the growing TrueNAS community. Download your copy of TrueNAS Community Edition today and join the thousands of users experiencing True Data Freedom. Share your experience on the newly relaunched TrueNAS Community Forums or find us on social media!

The post Fangtooth Unifies the TrueNAS Community appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

While the details can get technical, you don’t have to handle everything yourself. TrueNAS Enterprise appliances come pre-configured and performance-tested, so you can focus on your workloads with confidence that your system is ready to deliver. For our courageous and curious Community members, we’ve outlined the steps to defining, building, and testing a TrueNAS system to meet performance requirements.

Step 1: Setting Your Performance Target

Performance targets are typically defined using a combination of bandwidth (measured in GB/s) and IOPS (short for “Input/Output Operations Per Second.”) For video editing and backups, the individual file and IO size is large, but the number of IOPS is typically low. When supporting virtualization or transactional databases, the IO size is much smaller, but significantly more IOPS are needed.

Bandwidth needs are often best estimated by looking at file sizes and transfer time expectations. High-resolution video files can range from 1 GB to several hundred GB in size. When multiple editors are reading directly from files on the storage, bandwidth needs can easily reach 10GB/s or more; and in the opposite direction, a business may have a specific time window that all backup jobs must complete in.

IOPS requirements can be more challenging, but are often expressed as an expectation from a software vendor or end-user in terms of responsiveness. If a database query needs to return in less than 1 ms, one might think that this means 1000 IOPS is the minimum – but that database query might result in authentication, a table lookup, and an audit or access log update in addition to returning the data itself – a single query might be responsible for a factor of 10 or more IOPS generated. Consider the size of IO that will be sent as well – smaller IO sizes may only be able to be stored on or read from a smaller number of disks in your array.

Client count and concurrency also impacts performance. If a single client requires a given amount of bandwidth or IOPS, but only a handful of clients will access your NAS simultaneously, the requirements can be fulfilled with a much smaller system than if ten or a hundred clients are concurrently making those same demands.

Typically, systems that need more IOPS may also need lower latency. It’s essential to determine whether reliable and consistent sub-millisecond latency or low cost per TB is more important, and find the ideal configuration.

After deciding on your performance target, it’s time to move on to selecting your media and platform.

Step 2: Choosing Your Media

Unlike many other storage systems, TrueNAS supports all-flash (SSD), Hard Drive (HDD) configurations, and Hybrid (mixed SSD and HDD) systems. Choosing the media also determines the system capacity and price point.

With current technology, SSDs best meet high IOPS needs. NVMe SSDs are even faster and becoming increasingly economical. TrueNAS deploys with SSDs up to 30TB in size today, with larger drives planned for availability in the future. Each of these high-performance NVMe SSDs can deliver well over 1 GB/s and over 10,000 IOPS.

Hard drives provide the best cost per TB for capacity, but are limited in two performance dimensions. Sustained bandwidth is typically around 100 MB/s for many drives, and IOPS are around 100. The combination of OpenZFS’s transactional behavior and adaptive caching technology allow for the aggregation of these drives into larger, better-performing systems. The TrueNAS M60 can support over 1,000 HDDs to deliver 10 GB/s and 50,000 IOPS from as low as $60/TB. For high-capacity storage, magnetic hard drives offer an unbeatable cost per TB.

When your performance target is consistent sub-millisecond latency, and IOPS numbers are critical, systems like the all-NVMe TrueNAS F100 bring 24 NVMe drives. With directly connected NVMe drives, there’s no added latency or PCI Express switching involved, giving you maximum performance. With a 2U footprint, and the ability to expand with up to six additional NVMe-oF (NVMe over Fabric) 2U shelves, the F100 is the sleek, high-performance sports car to the M60’s box truck – lighter, nimble, and screaming fast, but at the cost of less “cargo capacity.”

While TrueNAS and OpenZFS cannot make HDDs faster than all-Flash, the Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC) and optional read cache (L2ARC) and write log (SLOG) devices can help make sure each system meets its performance targets. Read more about these devices in the links to the TrueNAS Documentation site above, or tune in to the TrueNAS Tech Talk (T3) Podcast episode, where the iX engineering team gives some details about where and when these cache devices can help increase performance.

Step 3: Choosing the Platform

After selecting suitable media, the next step to achieving a performance target is by selecting the proper hardware platform. Choose a platform balanced with the CPU, memory size, HBAs, network ports, and media drives needed to achieve a target performance level. Ensure that when designing your system to consider any requirements for power delivery and cooling in order to ensure overall stability.

Depending on the number and type of storage media selected, this may drive your platform decisions in a certain direction. A system designed for a high-bandwidth backup ingest with a hundred spinning disks will have a drastically different design from one that needs a few dozen NVMe devices. Each system will only perform as fast as its slowest component; software cannot fix a significant hardware limitation.

Each performance level has different platforms for different capacity and price points. Our customers typically choose the platforms based on the bandwidth and capacity required now or in the future. For systems where uptime and availability are crucial, platforms supporting High Availability (HA) are typically required.

Community users can build their own smaller systems using the same principles. Resources such as the TrueNAS Hardware Guide can offer excellent guidance for system component selection, as well as the TrueNAS Community Forums.

A key feature of TrueNAS is that all of our systems run the same software, from our all-NVMe F-series to the compact Mini line. While TrueNAS Enterprise and High-Availability systems carry some additional, hardware-specific functionality, the same key features and protocols are supported by TrueNAS Community Edition. There’s no need to re-learn or use a different interface – simply build or buy the hardware platform that supports your performance and availability requirements, and jump right into the same familiar interface that users around the world already know and love.

Step 4: Configuring a Test Lab

Not many users have the opportunity to build a full test lab to run a comprehensive performance test suite. At the TrueNAS Engineering lab, we maintain a performance lab for our customers and for the benefit of the broader TrueNAS community user base.

There are three general categories of tests that the TrueNAS team runs:

Single Client: A single client (Linux, Windows, Mac) connects via a higher-speed LAN (faster than the target bandwidth by 50%) to the NAS. The test suite (e.g., fio) runs on the client. This approach often tests the client operating system and software implementation as much as the NAS, and IOPS and bandwidth results are frequently client-limited. For example, a client may be restricted to less than 3GB/s even though the NAS itself has been verified as capable of greater than 10GB/s total. TCP and storage session protocols (iSCSI, NFS, SMB) can limit the client’s performance; but this test is important to conduct as it is a realistic use-case.

Multi-client: Given that each client is usually restricted to 2-3GB/s, a system capable of 10 or 20 GB/s needs more than 10 clients to test a NAS simultaneously. The only approach is to have a lab with tens of virtual or physical clients running each of the protocols. Purely synthetic tests like fio are used, as well as more complicated real-world workload tests like virtualization and software-build tests. The aggregate bandwidth and IOPS served to all clients are the final measures of success in this test.

Client Scalability: The last class of tests is needed to simulate use cases with thousands of clients accessing the same NAS. Thousands of users in a school, university, or large company may use a shared storage system, typically via SMB. How the NAS handles those thousands of TCP connections and sessions is important to scalability and reliable operation. To set up this test, we’ve invested in virtualizing thousands of Windows Active Directory (AD) and SMB clients.

Step 5: Choosing a Software Test Suite

There are many test suites out there. Unfortunately, most are for testing individual drives. We recommend the following to get useful results:

Test with a suite that is intended for NAS systems. Synthetic tests like fio fall into this category, providing many options for identifying performance issues.

Do not test by copying data. Copying data goes through a different client path than reading and writing data. Depending on your client, copying data can be very single-threaded and latency-sensitive. Using dd or copying folders will give you poor measurements compared with fio, and in this scenario you may be testing your copy software, not the NAS.

Pick a realistic IO size for your workload. The storage industry previously fixated on 4KB IOPS because applications like Oracle would use this size IO – but unless you’re using Oracle or a similar transactional database, it’s likely your standard IO size is between 32 KB and 1 MB. Test with that to assess your bandwidth and IOPS.

Look at queue depth. A local SSD will often perform better than a network share because of latency differences. Unless you use 100Gbe networking, networks will restrict bandwidth and add latency. Storage systems overcome latency issues by increasing “queue depth”, the number of simultaneous outstanding IOs. If your workload allows for multiple outstanding IOs, increase the testing queue depth. Much like adding more lanes on a highway, latency remains mostly the same, but with potentially greater throughput and IOPS results.

Make sure your network is solid. Ensure that the network path between testing clients and your NAS is reliable with no packet loss, jitter, or retransmissions. Network interruptions or errors impact TCP performance and reduce bandwidth. Using lossy mediums like Wi-Fi to test is not recommended.

In the TrueNAS performance labs, we run these tests across a range of platforms and media. Our goals are to confidently measure and predict the performance of Enterprise systems, as well as ensuring optimizations across the hardware and software stack of TrueNAS. We can also experiment with tuning options for specific workloads to offer best practices for our customers and community.

Electric Eel delivers Real Performance Improvements

Electric Eel benefits from improvements in OpenZFS, Linux, Samba, and of course optimizations in TrueNAS itself. Systems with an existing hardware bottleneck may not see obvious performance changes, but larger systems need software that scales its performance with hardware such as increasing CPU core and drive counts.

TrueNAS 24.10 builds on the 24.04 base and increases performance for basic storage services. Typically, we have measured up to a 70% IOPS improvement for all 3 major storage protocols (iSCSI, SMB, and NFS) when compared to TrueNAS 13.0. The improvement was measured on an identical hardware configuration, implying that the previous level of performance can be achieved with 30% fewer drives and processor cores for a budget-constrained use case.

“iSCSI Mixed Workload with VDIv2 Benchmark”

These performance gains are the result of tuning at each level of the software stack. The Linux OS has improved management of threads and interrupts, the iSCSI stack has lower latency and better parallelism, and code paths in OpenZFS 2.3 have made their own improvements to parallelism and latency. In the spirit of open source, the TrueNAS Engineering team helped contribute to the iSCSI and OpenZFS endeavours, ensuring that community members of both upstream projects can benefit.

Additionally, we also observed more than 50% performance improvements from changing media to NVMe SSDs vs SAS SSDs. Platforms like the all-NVMe F-Series can deliver 150% more performance than the previous generation of SAS-based storage.

Other highlights of the Electric Eel testing include:

Exceeding 20GB/s read performance on the F100 for all three storage protocols. The storage protocols all behave similarly over TCP. Write performance is about half as much due to the need to both write to the SLOG device and the pool for data integrity.

Exceeding 250K IOPS for 32KB block sizes on the F100. 32KB is a typical block size for virtualization workloads or more modern databases. This performance was observed over all three primary storage protocols.

Exceeding 2.5GB/s on a single client for each storage protocol (SMB, NFS, iSCSI) for read, write, and mixed R/W workloads. The F-Series is the lowest latency and offers the greatest throughput, but other platforms are typically above 2GB/s.

Each platform met its performance target across all three primary storage protocols, which is a testament not only to OpenZFS’s tremendous scalability, but the refinement of their implementation within TrueNAS to extract maximum performance.

Future Performance Improvements

Electric Eel includes an experimental version of OpenZFS Fast Dedup. After confirming stability and performance, we plan to introduce new TrueNAS product configurations for optimal use of this feature. The goal of this testing is to allow Fast Dedup to have a relatively low impact on performance if the system is well configured.

The upcoming OpenZFS 2.3 release (planned for availability with TrueNAS 25.04 “Fangtooth”) also includes Direct IO for NVMe, which enables even higher maximum bandwidths when using high-performance storage devices with workloads that don’t benefit as strongly from caching. Tests for this feature are still pending completion, so stay tuned for future updates and information on the upcoming TrueNAS 25.04 as we move forward with development.

The TrueNAS Apps ecosystem has moved to a Docker back end, which has significantly reduced base CPU load and memory overhead. This reduced overhead has enabled better performance for systems running Apps like Minio and Syncthing. While we don’t have quantified measurements in terms of bandwidth and IOPS, our community users have reported an overall positive perceived impact.

Evolution of TrueNAS

Given the quality, security, performance, and App improvements, we recommend that new TrueNAS users start their journey with “Electric Eel” to benefit from the latest changes. We will begin shipping TrueNAS 24.10 as the default software installed on our TrueNAS products in Q1 2025.

With the explosive popularity of Electric Eel, already more popular than Dragonfish and CORE 13.0, nearly all new deployments should deploy TrueNAS 24.10. Current TrueNAS CORE users can elect to remain on CORE or upgrade to Electric Eel. Performance has now exceeded 13.0 and the software is expected to mature further in 2025.

Join the Growing SCALE Community

With the release of TrueNAS SCALE 24.10, there’s never been a better time to join the growing TrueNAS community. Download the SCALE 24.10 installer or upgrade from within the TrueNAS web UI and experience True Data Freedom. Then, ensure you’ve signed up for the newly relaunched TrueNAS Community Forums to share your experience. The TrueNAS Software Status page advises which TrueNAS version is right for your systems.

The post TrueNAS Electric Eel Performance Sizzles appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

The post TrueNAS 24.10.1 “Electric Eel” is Charged Up appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

The first partner in this exciting venture is Eshtek, the pioneering company behind the upcoming HexOS home server, dedicated to making network-attached storage accessible and easy for the less IT-savvy. By leveraging the robust and reliable TrueNAS platform, HexOS will offer users a streamlined and automated experience for managing and protecting their personal data.

HexOS provides a beautifully simple UI, making it easy for users to set up and manage their own home servers. Jonathan Panozzo, the co-founder of Eshtek, commented, “Our mission is to empower individuals with complete control over their data and privacy without requiring IT admin skills. Partnering with TrueNAS enables us to provide an enterprise foundation for our home server solution, ensuring top-notch performance, reliability and security.”

“We are thrilled to support HexOS in their mission,” said Brett Davis, EVP at TrueNAS. “Our collaboration combines TrueNAS’s enterprise reliability with HexOS’s user-friendly interface, creating a powerful solution for both content creators and everyday users.”

The HexOS beta is planned for Q3 2024, and interested users can sign up on the HexOS website to enroll in their newsletter and stay updated on the latest developments.

For more information about HexOS, please visit www.hexos.com.
To learn more about the Powered by TrueNAS initiative, click here to contact us.

The post TrueNAS Launches “Powered by TrueNAS” Initiative with First Partner HexOS appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

In the last month, TrueNAS SCALE has reached over 130,000 users, slightly more than TrueNAS 13.0. Over 50,000 members of the TrueNAS Community have already upgraded to TrueNAS SCALE 24.04 and benefited from the new functionality introduced in the release version, and the performance tuning of the first major update. Thanks to their helpful and detailed feedback, we’re releasing 24.04.2 for our more mission-critical customers.

TrueNAS Enterprise users looking to upgrade their systems to 24.04.2 from an earlier version should contact iXsystems support to schedule a planned upgrade. TrueNAS 13.0 users will also have a choice of 13.3 later this year.

Added Features

TrueNAS SCALE 24.04.2 brings over 80 fixes and improvements, including:

• Linux kernel 6.6.32
• OpenZFS 2.2.4
• Reduction of writes to boot devices (we still recommend high-quality boot SSDs)
• Fix for CVE-2024-6387 (aka “regreSSHion”)
• Faster iSCSI failover times and fixes to ALUA bug
• Fixes for Intel ARC GPU transcoding support
• Fixes for Apple Time Machine users
• Improved dynamic ARC resizing under increased memory pressure

For a full list of the improvements in TrueNAS SCALE 24.04.2, please see the release notes on the TrueNAS Documentation Hub.

Enterprise Ready

With the release of 24.04.2, TrueNAS SCALE will be rolling out to our users with Mission Critical use cases after a few weeks of validation. Check the TrueNAS Software Status page for further details on the best time to upgrade your TrueNAS installation.

Intel ARC GPU Support

Included with TrueNAS SCALE 24.04.2 is hardware support for the line of Intel ARC graphics cards, bringing powerful video encoding and decoding capabilities with minimal additional power consumption.

Refinements and Quality-of-Life Improvements

In addition to improvements and updates to the pivotal services that make TrueNAS the safest place for your data, SCALE 24.04.2 improves the user interface by adding clearer tooltips, improves the readability and user-friendliness of informational and alert dialogs, and adds improved defaults for some popular command-line tools used by the more technical members of the community to fine-tune their TrueNAS installations.

“Electric Eel” is in Development

TrueNAS SCALE 24.04 “Dragonfish” is the predecessor to 24.10 “Electric Eel,” which is in active development for a Q4 release. As previously outlined in the TrueNAS Community Forums, Electric Eel will change the Apps engine from Kubernetes to Docker and Docker Compose. All of the official TrueNAS Catalog Apps, including Community apps, will be switched seamlessly. Look forward to the first 24.10-BETA release and additional details about Apps migration in August.

Get TrueNAS SCALE 24.04.2 Today

TrueNAS SCALE 24.04.2 is available today from the TrueNAS SCALE download page, and will be rolling out shortly as an optional update for users to download through the System Update menu in the TrueNAS web UI. Come join the over 50,000 Community members running the latest version of SCALE, and take your storage to the next level.

Download now

The post TrueNAS SCALE Dragonfish Matures with Second Major Quality Update appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Dragonfish is proving to be the best-ever TrueNAS version with significant improvements in the following areas:

Quality has been improved and demonstrated with a tremendously successful RC.1 and Release. There have been a record number of early adopters (32,000) and simultaneously a low number of reported issues. This update resolves all the major known issues with the initial release, including the excessive use of swap space and slow webUI performance.

Security enhancements, such as logging, auditing, restricted admins, and session monitoring have now been deployed by TrueNAS users with success.

Functionality and ease-of-use improvements have been getting positive feedback. The SMB/NFS share wizards, Netdata monitoring, SMB share importing, and Linux Sandboxes are all getting a good workout. Explore the TrueNAS Dragonfish Documentation for the other features.

Performance has been improved in many dimensions; IOPS, bandwidth, caching, metadata handling. Below, we’ll discuss this in more detail.

Fire-Breathing Performance Improvements

Dragonfish benefits from OpenZFS, Linux, SAMBA improvements, and some TrueNAS optimizations. The performance changes may not be obvious for smaller systems, but larger systems need software performance that scales with core and drive count. Dragonfish has significant improvements in IOPS (virtualization and databases), bandwidth (video and backup), and File Metadata (directory listings).

50% more IOPS: IOPS (Input/Outputs Per Second) is a classic storage metric for transactional workloads like virtual desktops and databases. On the same platform and pool configuration (a TrueNAS M50 with 20 SSDs in 4x 5wZ1) we see 50% higher IOPS with Dragonfish when compared to TrueNAS 13.0. This often implies 50% more VMs on a system and a 30% lower storage cost. As indicated in the chart below, Dragonfish uncorks the cache bottleneck present in  Cobia and improves majorly on 13.0 performance.

1000% faster File Metadata: Metadata performance is critical for applications that deposit thousands of files in a single directory, like some more automated scientific and manufacturing workloads, for example. Writing and reading the files can be fine, but listing the contents of a 100,000 file directory could take many minutes. With Dragonfish, a directory can have 10X more files than TrueNAS 13.0 or 23.10, but maintain the same performance for directory listings. For example, a million files in a directory can now be listed in as few as 15 seconds. Operating systems that access additional metadata in an inefficient manner (such as MacOS) may continue to experience slow directory listing times, due to the additional overhead of these clients.

WebUI performance was reported to be occasionally slow in 24.04 due to a change to Linux Kernel 6.6 swap algorithms. Thanks to prompt and helpful feedback from the early adopters of Dragonfish, iXsystems was able to track down the root of the problem and make the necessary adjustments. Swap has been disabled by default in this update, and the algorithms are configured better for situations where swap is enabled.

Evolution of TrueNAS

TrueNAS SCALE Dragonfish is expected to become the most commonly used software version during Q3 of 2024. Already, it is in 3rd position behind CORE 13.0 and SCALE 23.10.

Given the quality, security, performance, and Apps improvements, iX recommends that new TrueNAS users start with TrueNAS SCALE 24.04.1, and we will begin shipping SCALE as the default install on our TrueNAS Mini products in the near future.

Existing TrueNAS CORE users are welcome to stay on 13.0 or update to the new 13.3 version when it is released later in 2024. CORE users can choose to sidegrade to SCALE at any time if desired, but support for TrueNAS CORE will continue unchanged.

Join the Growing SCALE Community

With the release of TrueNAS SCALE 24.04, there’s never been a better time to join the growing TrueNAS community. Download the SCALE 24.04 installer or upgrade from within the TrueNAS web UI today, and experience True Data Freedom for yourself. Then, make sure you’ve signed up for the newly relaunched TrueNAS Community Forums to share your experience.

The post TrueNAS Dragonfish Performance Breathes Fire appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

As the fourth major version of TrueNAS SCALE, 24.04 brings forward major performance improvements, new features, and expanded hardware support. Dragonfish is expected to be the best-ever TrueNAS version with significant improvements in the following areas:

Quality has been improved and demonstrated with a tremendously successful RC.1 release. Verified users of prior versions (Bluefin & Cobia) rate their experiences 4.9 out of 5.0 stars. Based upon the record number of early adopters and simultaneously low number of reported issues, we expect it to be one of the most adopted and stable releases of TrueNAS ever.

Security continues to be  enhanced through the additions of logging authorization and configuration events. SMB client auditing improves share security. NIST 800-209 security and Immutable snapshots can be enabled using Restricted Admins in the Enterprise version.

Performance has been improved through ZFS ARC changes which allow full memory utilization, identical to CORE, and improvements in ZFS read-ahead caching. These improvements allow better parallelism in the primary NFS and SMB protocols, cutting your response time down and pushing your peak bandwidth up. Metadata handling has also improved, allowing for more than 10x speedups in directory listings.

Functionality and ease-of-use continue to grow with the inclusion of SMB/NFS share wizards, reintegration of Netdata monitoring, support for SMB share importing via Syncthing, and many other features. There’s even a new community-supported feature for Linux Sandboxes, a new jail-like capability.  Explore the TrueNAS Dragonfish Documentation or the software for the other features.

With the previous Cobia release, 40% of the TrueNAS Community has adopted SCALE. Dragonfish is expected to take this to well over 50%. We’re looking forward to the Community’s feedback as we continue through release and maintenance updates.

Added Features

The Dragonfish BETA announcement listed most of the additional features in Dragonfish. A later RC1 blog highlighted the many SMB file sharing improvements. This included the introduction of wizards to improve the Share Creation workflow. Users can now add shares during dataset creation or datasets during share creation – both methods are supported.

SMB Client Auditing has been added to the TrueNAS web UI. This audit trail provides TrueNAS administrators the ability to monitor client activity graphically through Web-Driven queries, as well as exporting of reports for offline auditing compliance. Live client sessions for both the SMB and NFS file-sharing protocols can also be viewed and managed from the TrueNAS web UI, allowing you to identify which files are open and in use by connected users. Use the new Sessions icon on the Sharing screen to explore this new functionality.

Finally, because we’d like to hear the community’s thoughts on these new features and changes, a new rating and feedback system has been introduced. Using the Send Feedback button available in the top navigation bar, you can rate any TrueNAS web UI page, report a bug, and suggest a new feature or improvement for inclusion into TrueNAS, all from the comfort of your TrueNAS web UI. Integrated screenshot functionality and collection of debug files are also available.

New Hardware Support

TrueNAS SCALE 24.04 includes support for the newest member of the TrueNAS Enterprise family, the versatile H-Series. With dual controllers for high-availability, the H-Series brings five-nines uptime to the Edge segment, letting small and medium enterprises benefit from the same time-tested OpenZFS filesystem and familiar TrueNAS management interface. TrueNAS SCALE 24.04 is available for all hardware offered by iXsystems, from compact and affordable Mini systems up to the all-NVMe TrueNAS F-Series.

Join the Growing SCALE Community

With the release of TrueNAS SCALE 24.04, there’s never been a better time to join the growing TrueNAS community. Download the SCALE 24.04 installer or upgrade from within the TrueNAS web UI today, and experience True Data Freedom for yourself.  Then, make sure you’ve signed up for the newly relaunched TrueNAS Community Forums to share your experience.

The post Enter the Dragonfish: TrueNAS Brings Performance Gains and Tightens Security appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Achieving RELEASE Status

Our primary objective is to advance each version of TrueNAS to RELEASE status, optimized with the maximum number of useful features and the minimum number of bugs possible. RELEASE status means that the software has passed rigorous testing and is deemed stable for general use. To reach this milestone, we initiate a Release Candidate (RC) process for each version, during which the software is deemed functionally complete and subjected to intensive testing. We gauge the quality of our RC versions by two key metrics: the growing number of RC users and the declining number of bug reports.

TrueNAS 24.04: A Marked Increase in Early Adoption

The BETA phase for Dragonfish (SCALE 24.04) began in early February. Four weeks ago, we released Dragonfish-RC.1, which has already outperformed all previous CORE and SCALE versions. As seen in the chart below, it has attracted nearly ten times the number of early users compared to TrueNAS 13.0, our most popular version to date.

TrueNAS 24.04 had 10X Early Users of TrueNAS 13.0

Dragonfish (SCALE 24.04) started its BETA in early February. The latest Dragonfish-RC.1 version has been available for 4 weeks and has far surpassed all other CORE and SCALE versions, growing almost 10x in early users over TrueNAS 13.0, the most widely used version today.

Driven by Quality Assurance

While new features are always exciting, they can introduce bugs. Our significant quality improvements are a direct result of four strategic enhancements:

With record level usage, we have only seen a small fraction of the bug reports. The official RELEASE, SCALE 24.04.0, will be available next week. We are eager to receive and share the early adopter feedback.

Quality Assurance (QA) infrastructure: From tiny 1 TB VMs to Minis, R-Series, and F-Series, all the way to a large 1200-drive M60, our QA infrastructure has grown by tenfold with the build-out of the TrueNAS Innovation Center (TIC) in Tennessee.

Automated testing: The QA team has greatly increased the number of automated tests for each release. The automation includes functional testing, UI testing, performance testing, and failure testing for our HA systems. In each two-week sprint, we perform over 10,000+ tests.

Better user feedback: Built into the Dragonfish WebUI are bug-reporting capabilities that can capture debugs and screenshots for more straightforward diagnosis.

More early users: With 10x the number of early users, we get quality feedback almost 10x faster. This gives us more time to fix issues and more confidence in the quality at an earlier stage of development. We deeply appreciate our TrueNAS community for their invaluable contributions through testing and feedback.

In addition, we are delighted to report that the major components that make up TrueNAS, such as OpenZFS, SAMBA, and Linux, have all proven to be of the highest quality for this release. We are happy to continue contributing to the Open Source ecosystem with bug fixes and improvements alike!

The other evidence of the quality improvements has been the impressively positive verified customer reviews for TrueNAS in the distributed file system and object storage category, where Bluefin and Cobia users rate their experience 5 stars (out of 5). While those ratings also encompass their experiences with our  Sales and Support teams, they surely would not be possible without excellent software quality. Currently, we have no service-impacting software issues in our 5,000+ Enterprise accounts.

We at iX wish to thank our phenomenal Engineering / QA teams and TrueNAS community testers for all the significant efforts going into Dragonfish. And we are still just getting started.

We are immensely grateful to our TrueNAS community for their dedication to testing and providing feedback.

Continuous Improvement with TrueNAS 13.3

Following the release of Dragonfish (24.04), TrueNAS CORE 13.3 will undergo the same rigorous QA process, offering an easy update path for users of TrueNAS 13.0. This update benefits from proven components already used in Dragonfish, including the latest updates to OpenZFS and Samba. Despite the complexity of updating from FreeBSD 13.0 to 13.3, we are committed to ensuring a reliable process for our CORE users with a full BETA release scheduled to start in May. Nightly versions are already available for developers, and we are eager to see the engagement levels during the BETA and RC.1 phases.

Your Data, Your Way

With each new release, our focus remains unchanged: to empower you to access and manage your data exactly how you want. As TrueNAS evolves, it offers a cleaner user interface and new features such as apps and catalogs tailored to meet your needs. TrueNAS facilitates the seamless migration of storage services and VMs from CORE to SCALE, and allows for the replacement of plugins and jails with apps and sandboxes, enhancing your storage experience.

The post TrueNAS 24.04 to Achieve a New Level of Quality appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

TrueNAS SCALE Dragonfish (24.04), the fourth major version of SCALE, builds on the high availability, scale-up storage, and easy deployment of containerized applications included in Cobia (23.10). The new features of Dragonfish were previously described in the BETA announcement and demonstrated by prolific community member Tom Lawrence. These included over 1,000 improvements addressing security, auditing, cloud backup, reporting, and log management. We’re very excited that the Release version is on track for April 2024.

Major SMB Services Improvements

TrueNAS 23.10.2 has been well received by those using it, particularly those running SMB. It is our recommended version today, and provides Enterprise quality with fast failover (HA systems only), SMB file sync, and optional FIPS-grade encryption.

While Dragonfish can provide all of the standard file, block, object, and App services of Cobia, this section will focus on the improvements for SMB users of TrueNAS specifically. Whether you are running Windows, MacOS, or Linux clients, SMB has become the most commonly used file sharing protocol. Here are the primary changes coming with Dragonfish compared to Cobia and TrueNAS CORE:

Major SMB Performance Accelerations

• 10x faster server-side file copies with OpenZFS 2.2.2
• 2x increase of default ZFS ARC size to match TrueNAS CORE ZFS usage
• Better metadata management for up to 10x faster directory listings
• Improved speeds allow over 1 million files per Directory (10x increase)
• General Samba 4.19 speed improvements
• Over 3GB/s second single-client speed without SMB Multichannel

Significant SMB Server Security Improvements

• Auditing of TrueNAS UI/API events
• Audit logging of all TrueNAS system and SMB login attempts
• Vastly Improved Log management UI
• Restricted admins (system, storage, monitoring) using Directory Services (Enterprise only)
• Immutable ZFS snapshots (relies on restricted admins)
• Samba 4.19 security vulnerability fixes
• NIST 800-209 Storage Security Compliance for government/defense customers
• First-ever Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) for TrueNAS

Advanced File Sharing Features

• Simpler SMB and NFS share creation with a wizard
• SMB auditing of client and file events (e.g., open, read, write, modify)
• FreeIPA support (open-source alternative to Active Directory)
• Syncthing importing of SMB shares from other systems with full ACLs/permissions
• Verified support for shares with mixed NFSv4 and SMB access

Automated Backup and Management

• Improved backup and setup of Cloud Sync Tasks
• Visibility into backup status on main dashboards
• Replication management via TrueCommand 3.0
• SMB session management
• Netdata reporting integrated within WebUI

The much-desired return of Netdata reporting is only possible because of its full support of Linux. Unfortunately, Netdata’s support of FreeBSD was tepid at best.

The RC1 version includes over 200 fixes to the BETA. If you’re interested in seeing the full list of improvements and fixes, check out the SCALE 24.04-RC1 Release Notes on the TrueNAS Docs site.

As with any RC1 release, we recommend that only testers and early adopters use this version until there has been more feedback from the Community. The TrueNAS Software Status Page tracks the quality and user type and usage recommendation of the release. TrueNAS SCALE 23.10.2 is recommended for nearly anyone from early-adopters to conservative users.

TrueNAS CORE 13.3 is Planned for Q2

TrueNAS SCALE is the software edition where forward-looking development takes place. Once new features and components  are tested and validated there, some are eligible for backporting to TrueNAS CORE. The focus of TrueNAS CORE continues to be sustaining storage reliability and security for existing users.

The next version of TrueNAS CORE (renamed as 13.3 to align with its FreeBSD base version) is planned for Q2 of 2024. This will include updates to ZFS as well as an upgrade of Samba to version 4.19 to maintain parity with Dragonfish. It also smoothes transitions for users from CORE to SCALE, especially for HA systems.

TrueNAS 13.0 users can easily “sidegrade” to TrueNAS SCALE Dragonfish with the primary exception being Jail users. Dragonfish includes early support for Sandboxes, offering jail-like capabilities in Linux.

TrueNAS SCALE 23.10.2 is the Current Version

TrueNAS SCALE has inherited the storage functionality and automated testing from CORE. SCALE has matured rapidly and offers a more robust app environment based on Linux Containers & KVM. TrueNAS SCALE has become the recommended version for new TrueNAS users.

The latest Cobia release, TrueNAS SCALE 23.10.2, has reached Enterprise quality and is now used by many of our largest and most conservative customers. More than 105,000 users are currently using TrueNAS SCALE and it is available for download here.

TrueNAS provides these choices and the ability to automatically migrate storage services and VMs from CORE to SCALE. Plugins and jails can be manually replaced with apps and sandboxes. We encourage anyone looking for further advice or answers to questions to visit our Community Forums or Discord Channel.

Freedom to Store What’s Valuable to You

For each new release, our focus stays the same—to provide you with the freedom to access and manipulate your data your way. As TrueNAS has evolved, it has brought a cleaner user interface with added features like apps and catalogs to serve your requirements.

We look forward to working with the TrueNAS Community to rapidly progress Dragonfish through RC1 and Release. If you have a test system, please download the Dragonfish RC1 and report any bugs you find. Our engineering team would also like to hear positive experiences from any of the new features.

The post TrueNAS SCALE Dragonfish improves SMB Services and Performance appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

TrueNAS SCALE 23.10.2 is the second maintenance update to 23.10 with over 60 improvements and bug fixes. In less than two weeks, over 20,000 users have updated with very few issues reported. We are already recommending that users update their Cobia systems to this latest release. Visit the TrueNAS Software Status Page for our most up-to-date recommendations.

The software quality of TrueNAS SCALE is now approaching the high level of TrueNAS CORE 13.0. Some of our largest Enterprise users have already sidegraded to 23.10.2 with good experience and performance results. The most significant advantages of 23.10 are:

TrueSecure features: FIPS-grade encryption and rootless administration are required for many Federally compliant use-cases.

Mixed NFSv4/SMB workloads: Consistent ACLs and file locks simplify this use-case where Linux/Unix servers and Windows clients need to use both NFS and SMB to access files on the same dataset.

Faster HA Failover: The failover process has been streamlined with VRRP to reduce times by typically 50%. Under 30 second failovers are now normal and have little impact on VMs and applications.

File Sync:  The Syncthing App can be used to sync or migrate SMB or NFS files between TrueNAS systems in real-time.

F-Series:  The all-new, all-NVMe TrueNAS F-series appliances with HA are built on TrueNAS 23.10. This high bandwidth beast is built for video-editing, AI, extreme virtualization performance, and other demanding applications. It is the industry’s fastest HA ZFS machine.

Enterprise users looking to make this transition should discuss with their iX support representatives and create a plan.

Cobia Update Improves Reporting, Privacy, and Compatibility

The Cobia 23.10.2 update is primarily focused on bug fixes and updates. Some of the highlights include:

• Linux Kernel 6.1.74
• OpenZFS 2.2.3 early patch set (fully compatible with ZFS 2.2.2)
• More accurate disk temperature and network performance reports
• Improved privacy for debug files submitted with support tickets
• Allows for larger application catalogs
• Over 60 additional bug fixes

There are still some corner-case issues with third-party Apps, GPUs and Kubernetes. These are under active investigation, and support from the Community to debug these issues is greatly appreciated. There are a wide variety of hardware and App deployment scenarios.

Most new features are now being added to Dragonfish which is well into its BETA phase. The 24.04 BETA version has over 1,000 users providing feedback and refinements that will be candidates for inclusion in the RC.1 version planned for March 2024.

More information can be found in the TrueNAS SCALE release notes. To join the over 100,000 users already using TrueNAS SCALE, download the installer here or use the System Update feature from within your existing TrueNAS install.

What TrueNAS SCALE Will Become

With the collaborative nature of open source software development as a cornerstone of iXsystems, TrueNAS SCALE will become the solution that the community wants it to be. All iXians (what we refer to ourselves at iX) are part of the community, and we rely on feature requests and feedback to provide valuable insight into the way that you, the user base, makes use of the functionality of TrueNAS to best serve your needs for True Data Freedom.

The post TrueNAS SCALE 23.10.2 delivers Enterprise Quality appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Fast Dedup is a major overhaul of the original OpenZFS deduplication capability. One of the primary issues with traditional deduplication with ZFS has been the need to keep the deduplication hash tables in memory at all times to avoid massive performance penalties. This existing functionality led to performance challenges when scaling up capacity and usability issues during operation.

With the introduction of Fast Dedup, there have been several major innovations including:

• The size of metadata is now dynamically sized to fit in either RAM or dedicated flash devices to avoid hitting the performance penalty wall.
• The metadata structure has been completely re-engineered to enable efficient updates using a log append process, greatly improving performance for large updates such as deletions.
• The dedup table will favor dedup-able data and prune blocks that show no dedup potential.
• Combining metadata improvements with properly configured storage, including dedicated metadata flash devices, will improve the sustained dedup performance by over an order of magnitude for larger systems.

Kudos to the Development Team

Led by Allan Jude of Klara, the development team included engineers from Klara and iXsystems. The development was completed in less than a year thanks to the strong OpenZFS expertise of the team. The project was primarily sponsored by iXsystems for use in TrueNAS, the industry’s most used storage platform.

“Klara is very proud of the speed and functional quality of the Fast Dedup development.” said Allan Jude. “We look forward to completing the integration and testing work needed for this to be a standard OpenZFS capability, with no extra cost.”

By contributing the software now, Klara and iXsystems are working to ensure it will have the quality needed to be included in OpenZFS 2.3. The contributed software has gone through preliminary validation and we look forward to wider community testing. Making it available to the OpenZFS community will allow enhanced review and testing with a broader range of use cases and capacities.

“The OpenZFS Community is very excited to receive this major contribution of Fast Dedup software,” said Matt Ahrens. “Fast Dedup has been a major user desire for many years and we are pleased to see that Klara and iXsystems have developed the feature in-line with our general requirements. We look forward to testing and integrating the new software.”

OpenZFS 2.3 is expected to take most of the next nine months to mature and reach release quality and status. These Fast Dedup features will be integrated with TrueNAS SCALE “Electric Eel” along with other expected OpenZFS improvements.

TrueNAS with Fast Dedup

Test software, not to be used for production, is expected in Q2 for TrueNAS SCALE. This will allow validation of functionality and performance prior to a production release.

A formal TrueNAS release with Fast Dedup included is planned for the second half of 2024. This will be in both TrueNAS SCALE Community Edition and TrueNAS Enterprise appliances, including the TrueNAS F-Series, M-Series, and R-Series.

“Fast Dedup has been a longstanding desired feature of ZFS and TrueNAS, and can deliver 5X the usable capacity and 20X the performance.” said Kris Moore, SVP of Engineering. “These attributes will significantly improve the economics of OpenZFS storage relative to Cloud storage and proprietary storage, and our team could not be more ecstatic to see this come to fruition.”

Contact the Developers

For more information or to volunteer for the ongoing testing and validation processes, please contact one of the primary developers.

iXsystems is the company behind TrueNAS. You can make an impact in the community by getting to know TrueNAS SCALE now, developing on nightly builds in March, and testing closer to RELEASE later this year. If we can also help your company with TrueNAS Enterprise appliances, book a time to chat with a product specialist.

Klara is a leading developer of OpenZFS and FreeBSD software. Interested in Klara developing software for your OpenZFS project? Contact Klara to learn more about their offerings.

The post Fast Dedup is a Valentines Gift to the OpenZFS and TrueNAS Communities appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

What’s New In Dragonfish?

Just another thousand improvements and fixes, of course! Rather than go through every enhancement in detail, we’ll provide a quick overview and share the specifics of key Dragonfish features in future blogs. Some of the highlights include: Infrastructure

• Latest OpenZFS 2.2.2
• Increase of default ZFS ARC size, to match TrueNAS CORE ZFS usage
• Linux Kernel 6.6 and improved Hardware Support
• Update to NVIDIA Driver 545.23.08
• Improved Log management UI
• Apps can be restricted to read-only or write-only permissions
• Preliminary Power-User capabilities for TrueNAS Sandboxes (systemd-nspawn “jails”)

File Sharing

• Samba 4.19.3 update and speed improvements
• Simpler SMB and NFS share creation with a wizard
• SMB auditing of client and file events
• FreeIPA support (alternative to Active Directory)
• Syncthing Importing of SMB shares from other systems with full ACLs/Permissions

Cloud Backup

• Improved backup and setup of Cloud Sync Tasks
• Visibility into Backup Status on main dashboards
• iX-Storj Backup of datasets (Web UI) and zvols (CLI-only)
  • Snapshots and Deduplication of all backup data

Security

• Auditing of all UI/API events
• Audit logging of all login attempts
• Tech-Preview of Restricted admins (System, Storage) using Directory Services (Enterprise-only)
• Immutable ZFS snapshots (relies on restricted admins)

If you’re interested in seeing the full list of improvements and fixes, check out the SCALE 24.04-BETA Release Notes on the TrueNAS Docs site. As with any BETA release, we recommend that only testers and developers use this version until there has been more feedback from the Community. The TrueNAS Software Status Page tracks the quality and user-type and usage recommendation of the release.

Dragonfish Increases SCALE ARC Sizing

After extensive testing, TrueNAS SCALE Dragonfish resolves the previous limitations around the ZFS Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC) bringing SCALE in line with the TrueNAS CORE platform, offering significant improvements in performance and memory management. While this adjustment can be manually made in TrueNAS SCALE 23.10, Dragonfish makes it the default, allowing for greater performance of your most frequently and recently used data.

Dragonfish Uses Linux Kernel 6.6 with LTS

Each new version of TrueNAS uses the latest stable and well-supported version of the underlying OS. The decision on which version is finalized well before the 1st ALPHA software version. Linux Kernel 6.6 has its own set of improvements, plus support for new hardware. In addition, we added the later NVIDIA 545.23.08 driver, which includes improved support for a wider range of GPUs. There will be descriptions of other features in future blogs over the next few months.

TrueNAS CORE 13.1 is Planned for Q2

TrueNAS SCALE is the software edition where new features and updated components are developed and tested. Once those are tested and validated, some are eligible for backporting to TrueNAS CORE. The focus of TrueNAS CORE continues to be ensuring storage reliability and security for existing users. The next version of TrueNAS CORE (13.1) is planned for Q2 of 2024. This will include updates to ZFS as well as an upgrade of Samba to version 4.19, to maintain parity with Dragonfish. It also smoothes transitions for users from CORE to SCALE, especially for HA systems. TrueNAS 13.0 users can sidegrade to TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 with the primary exception being Jail users. Dragonfish will include early support for “sandboxes”, which are jail-like capabilities using systemd nspawn containers. Thanks to the community user jip-hop for creating the jailmaker scripts.

TrueNAS SCALE 23.10.1.3 is the Current Version

TrueNAS SCALE has inherited the storage functionality and automated testing from CORE. SCALE has matured rapidly and offers a more robust apps environment based on Linux Containers & KVM. TrueNAS SCALE is generally recommended for new users that need embedded apps, and will gradually become the recommended version for all new TrueNAS users. The latest stable release, TrueNAS SCALE 23.10.1.3, has significantly improved quality and reliability and is now used by many of our largest customers. More than 100,000 users are currently using TrueNAS SCALE and it is available for download here. There will be a TrueNAS SCALE 23.10.2 version released later in February. TrueNAS provides these choices and the ability to automatically migrate storage services and VMs from CORE to SCALE. Plugins and jails can be manually replaced with apps. We encourage anyone looking for further advice or answers to questions to visit our Community Forums or Discord Channel.

Freedom to Store What’s Valuable to You

For each new release, our focus stays the same—to provide you with the freedom to access and manipulate your data your way. As TrueNAS has evolved, it has brought a cleaner user interface with added features like apps and catalogs to serve your requirements. We look forward to working with the TrueNAS Community to rapidly progress Dragonfish through BETA to RC1 and Release. If you have a test system, please and report any bugs you find. Our engineering team would also like to hear positive experiences from any of the new features.

The post TrueNAS SCALE Dragonfish Reaches BETA appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

By keeping it closed, vendors can ensnare customers into a more resource-intensive and expensive model while promising that solutions will be forthcoming. Their goal is to grow fast, improve margins, and extract the maximum customer revenues by preventing alternatives from getting a foothold.

This has been the storage model for decades. Where there had only been proprietary solutions before, Open Infrastructure has become the dominant model for operating systems (Linux), containers (Kubernetes), databases (NoSQL) and many more layers of the stack. So, why has the model for storage remained unchanged when the rest of IT infrastructure has evolved beyond it?

The Open Source Choice

By contrast, Open Storage is built around a mindset of abundance, where the best products and user experience win in the marketplace. The combination of an open-source community, customers, and vendor support yields a confluence of innovation that no lone source could provide.

At iXsystems, we seek to give our customers more choice in how they can store, access, and manipulate their data. We call this Data Freedom, which we define as: what all organizations ultimately want and expect from storage: flexibility and choice. In other words, the freedom to go faster, lower infrastructure costs, and reduce operational effort. In our model, the only “lock-in” we strive for is a user and customer experience so gratifying that customers don’t ever need or want to leave.

Rising Costs

Odds are you’ve seen articles and discussions of increasing hardware prices. Here are two recent examples highlighting expectations that storage will be more expensive in 2024 than it was in 2023:

• Market Anticipates a 50% Price Surge for NAND Flash in Short-Term
• Prices Rise as IT Spending Trends Upward for Servers, Storage

There is no more serious business than protecting data thus storage is naturally the last place where anyone would want to skimp. Vendors prey on this emotion, persuading customers that the value they claim is worth paying more for, and the only way you can be successful. But, the reality is, the “big” brands charge more because they must. Their business model relies on meeting Wall Street and investor expectations, where growth and profit are the only measures.

Alternatives are bad for the status quo, especially when an alternative is rated equally or more highly. One way for an alternative to rate more highly is to be focused on delivering what the customer wants/needs as opposed to the vendors’ business model.

What Can I Control?

If you are part of the selection process for infrastructure vendors, what’s most under your control is your “short list”. Alternative brands often cost less as they are in a “challenger” position against the leading brand. Any organization has the option to consider “challenger” brands and non-commercial tools. What might have been the best or only choice in the past, might not be the best one today.

While broadening the list of choices, new requirements can also be added in the spirit of “skating to where the puck is going”. Don’t plan based upon the past, rather envision what your future will bring. You have the power to ensure your investments today will align with the future of both the market and your data center infrastructure.

Where Is The Puck Going?

The best choice today is storage that is compatible with, and optimized, for where the market is going. The good news is that the marketplace trajectory is becoming more flexible in its deployment options, more capable by including functionality , more open in its development model, all while delivering better value overall to those deploying it.

According to research, analysts recommend that organizations explore the emergence of the “edge storage platform” (ESP). The ESP is where data manipulation and transformation at the edge will create value most quickly. As part of the larger “universal storage platform” (USP) architecture that unites edge, cloud, and core data centers, ESPs are best optimized for certain workloads, use cases, and data service management methods.

These requirements are different from traditional and legacy data center models and must include:

• Flexibility to scale up and down cost-effectively
• Software-defined storage with self-healing technology
• Support for Block, File, Object, and App storage with Kubernetes
• Centralized data management
• Data transfer/transformation optimization

It will be interesting to see how the definition of “storage” evolves over time. One thing is for sure, traditional storage vendors face a significant challenge in meeting these new requirements.

The Elephant in the Room

If I am not paying for it, how can I trust it will not fail? This is a very human reaction. No one has ever lost their job for choosing a top-branded, premium-positioned solution when it inevitably suffers a fault. After all, your data is priceless and the best solutions are always costly, so your storage should be expensive, right?

Mathematically, how can you calculate the currency-equivalent value for reliable storage solution operations if its software is open source and freely distributed at no cost? Your high school math teacher stated that anything divided by zero is undefined; that sounds risky. Perhaps it might be best to take a different perspective when considering value creation for storage.

Same Outcome, Lower Cost

Generic medicines are considered by most (including regulators) to be “as effective” as Big Pharma offerings with the same active ingredients. Packaging, marketing, sales, etc. are very different for a leading brand as they have market position to protect and stakeholders to appease. None of this impacts the efficacy of the medication, but it does affect the sales price.

Just as being free is not a disqualifier for having value, lower-cost open products should not be presumed to be of lower quality by design. Challengers streamline or reduce much of the cost structure to deliver an equivalent product at a lower price point. We are champions of open infrastructure. Read more about how iXsystems passes these savings on to our customers.

Experience it for Yourself

The Open Source model has many advantages in reducing software development costs. It can even bring features to fruition more rapidly as community members assist in the development effort. This is a fundamentally different approach that delivers greater value at lower expense while providing what customers want in their storage solution.

Sounds too good to be true? We encourage you to experience TrueNAS for yourself today (download TrueNAS here), listen to what our customers are saying on Gartner’s Website, or if you’re storing critical data, feel free to schedule a call with one of our helpful Solution Advisors.

Still curious about why we do what we do? Check out this video with some of the faces behind TrueNAS, sharing their perspectives on what it is like for iXians to come to work every day and deliver TrueNAS to the world.

The post Why Traditional Enterprise Storage is So Expensive appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

At iXsystems, we do not answer to the same Wall Street or Venture Capital stakeholders that other vendors do. This allows us to focus exclusively on making our customers successful, powered by our core value to always “think people before profit”.

The benefits of our Open Source business model are no secret. They are simply unique to iXsystems in the Enterprise Storage market. We leverage open source development, non-traditional tactics, and the energy and engagement of the massive TrueNAS Community to help deliver products rated higher on Gartner than our competition. Collectively, this gives iXsystems an unfair and sustainable advantage in delighting customers while charging less to deliver positive outcomes.

Simply put—our model requires far fewer resources, and we pass those savings on to our customers. We charge less.

How It Works

Compared to iXsystems, traditional data storage vendors are forced to maintain outsized corporate overheads — both in terms of expense and effort — just to keep their technology closed, patented, and to capture 100% of the value they create.

We carry none of that burden, which enables us to be more nimble and efficient. Here’s how that works and how it benefits our customers:

Community – Community is the special ingredient. We are grateful to be stewards of the TrueNAS Open Source project. Consider the unique combination of TrueNAS community and users; iXsystems and partners; customers; and non-paying users. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and contributions from the Community bring enormous value. With iXsystems’ contributions and the incredible Community, this enables agility, investment, and innovation to TrueNAS that no proprietary company could emulate.

Software Development – Plain and simple, making software that is proprietary and closed-source requires more effort, resources, and money than open-source development. Most storage vendors also have multiple code bases, further compounding this disadvantage, while iXsystems has one open-source code base to maintain and grow. This common code base includes many other open-source elements (e.g., OpenZFS), which expands the community of talented Engineers directly contributing to TrueNAS, further reducing costs.

Product Management – Unlike other enterprise storage vendors, iXsystems does not invest in efforts to lock in customers; we do the very opposite by making TrueNAS as open, compatible, interoperable, and easy to leave as possible. However, we believe that once you experience TrueNAS, you won’t want to leave. We don’t have complex software licensing, and our appliances can run the latest software for years, long after the hardware is depreciated — a sustainability practice we fully encourage! At iXsystems, there are zero development cycles spent on planned obsolescence.

Security – TrueNAS is Open Source and therefore transparent by default, with broader user coverage and more eyeballs on the code, thereby leveraging massive user communities to help uncover, alert, and respond to security vulnerabilities. This enables code fixes much faster than proprietary vendors who can only rely on internal resources or respond only after the vulnerability has impacted their customers. Additional security enhancements (e.g. FIPS 140) are available with TrueNAS Enterprise appliances.

Quality – This is another area where the Community makes a huge difference. At a fraction of the investment, Quality Assurance for TrueNAS software takes less time, money, and resources, all while providing more complete test coverage. When a version is declared ready for general use, it has benefitted from extensive community testing. TrueNAS sees faster bug reporting/testing and a more rapid access to new features and fixes than other vendors (who often use their first customer shipments as QA) because of the feedback from the community.

Interoperability – Being open also makes iX a very easy company for other software vendors to partner with, as they need no demo units or non-disclosure agreements to test that their technology works well with TrueNAS.

Documentation – Like Quality, many hands make for light work. By the time a release is recommended for general use, documentation has been reviewed by thousands, accelerating the process of ensuring accuracy.

Intellectual Property – Effort is required to protect technology for maximum profit. iXsystems spends no energy on patents, choosing instead to focus resources on value creation rather than blocking innovation.

Sales – TrueNAS Community Edition software is free to try and use, and has been shown to run on almost any x86 hardware, or can be spun up easily in a VM. As such, we encourage audiences to try it for themselves without any involvement from a sales team. Our experts at iX then help customers identify the optimal configuration of TrueNAS Enterprise appliance(s) for important storage applications.

Marketing – Where our competition spends money on marketing, we instead spend on developing free software that delights our users. Word of mouth is the original marketing tactic and the goodwill we invest in the TrueNAS community results in outsized awareness. With more than 15 million downloads and more than a half million active community members, appreciative users write blogs and how-to content, influencers create videos, and hundreds of thousands of community members tell others about their positive experiences with TrueNAS.

Sustainability – Most storage vendors rely on forced obsolescence to maintain growth. At the end of its supported life, most IT infrastructure is scrapped and not recycled, let alone reused. With TrueNAS software, organizations can repurpose infrastructure beyond its normal life and extract more value from it. After 3-7 years of mission-critical duty, appliances from iXsystems can remain updated with the latest software and transition to a less critical storage role for many years while positively impacting sustainability and financial efficiency.

How This Benefits YOU

“Value” means receiving the most for your dollar. However, most traditional vendors use the word “value” in the context of justifying why it’s worthwhile to pay more for their product. At iX, we don’t have to contort the definition of the word into something it’s not. Our goal in creating TrueNAS was to allow our customers to receive more from our products while also paying less — the true meaning of value as far as we’re concerned.

Experience it for Yourself

We encourage you to experience True Data Freedom for yourself today (download TrueNAS here), see what our customers are saying on Gartner’s Website, or if you’re storing critical data, feel free to schedule a call with one of our helpful Product Experts.

Still curious about why we do what we do? Check out this video with some of the faces behind TrueNAS, sharing their perspectives on what it is like for iXians to come to work every day and deliver TrueNAS to the world.

The post How TrueNAS Delivers Unbeatable Value 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.

TrueNAS SCALE 23.10.1 includes almost 200 bug fixes and improvements, including a fix for the 15-year-old ZFS bug that was recently discovered. There are several improvements to GPU isolation handling, and the ‘statistics export’ API to Graphite has been reactivated. SCALE users can now make use of Apps such as Grafana and Prometheus for additional real-time monitoring and reporting of their TrueNAS statistics.

Please read the release notes before updating. This update is recommended for early adopters until there has been more testing and feedback from the Community. Visit the TrueNAS Software Status Page for our most up-to-date recommendations.

TrueNAS Enterprise appliances with 23.10.1 begin shipping in early 2024. These include the following TrueNAS appliances:

• F-Series: New high-performance, all-NVMe HA systems
• M-Series: Scalable systems with HA supporting up to 25PB
• X-Series: 2U energy-efficient HA systems
• R-Series: Single controller systems with the lowest price per TB
• Mini Series: Ultra-quiet systems for home and SMB / SME

Major Features in TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 Release

Highlights of the all-new features in SCALE 23.10 include:

SMB

• SMB and NFSv4 Compatibility
• SMB Share import
• SMB File Sync
• Fast File Copy
• SMB Performance and Scalability
• Samba security updates

Infrastructure

• Linux Kernel 6.1 and improved hardware support
• NVIDIA 535.54.03 driver updates
• Netdata backend stats collection
• Scale up to 1200 drives and 25 PB+ on a single system

Web Interface

• Improved Apps UI
• Improved Storage Pool UI
• Simplified feedback and bug reporting

ZFS & Performance Improvements

• OpenZFS 2.2.2 with many iXsystems contributions
• ZFS Block Cloning (type of deduplication) for faster SMB & NFS file copies
• ZFS dRAID Pool Layouts
• Pause / Unpause ZFS Scrub Controls
• Reduction of HA failover times by up to 70%

NVMe Platforms

• All-new F-Series NVMe HA platforms
• iSCSI improvements including ALUA support
• Sub 20 Second HA failover times
• General improvements in NVMe performance and management

TrueNAS SCALE “Cobia” 23.10 completed a very successful BETA, RC.1 cycle, and Release cycle. We wish to recognize and thank the more than 30,000 community members who have provided invaluable feedback. Many users have found the new bug reporting and webUI feedback built into Cobia to be very user friendly.

In addition, TrueCommand 3.0 has been released and includes full support for TrueNAS SCALE 23.10. It is available as a self-hosted container or hosted subscription service. To learn more about TrueCommand’s ability to manage your TrueNAS system fleet, visit https://www.truenas.com/truecommand/ and get started with your first 50 drives for free.

TrueNAS 13.1 Will Inherit Some Cobia Improvements

In addition, TrueNAS 13.1 is planned to follow with a release in early 2024. This update will include the many SMB and ZFS improvements that have been implemented and tested in TrueNAS SCALE Cobia. Nightly versions are available for testers and those who wish to help contribute to TrueNAS development. The link to the nightly versions can be found on the TrueNAS Software Status Page.

TrueNAS 13.1 includes additional features to simplify “sidegrading” from TrueNAS 13.1 to TrueNAS SCALE 23.10, especially for Enterprise HA systems. Additional information will be available for TrueNAS 13.1 when it reaches BETA status.

TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 is now the Default for SCALE

TrueNAS SCALE inherited storage functionality and automated testing from CORE. Based on Linux, KVM, and Kubernetes, SCALE offers a more robust environment for apps. To join the >100,000 users already using TrueNAS SCALE, download the installer here or use the System Update feature from within your existing TrueNAS install.

Work has already begun on the next TrueNAS SCALE release, codenamed “Dragonfish”. There will be updates on this plan in February 2024.

TrueNAS provides these choices and the ability to automatically migrate storage services and VMs from CORE to SCALE. Plugins and jails in CORE can be manually replaced with Apps in SCALE. We encourage anyone looking for further advice or answers to questions to visit our Community Forums or Discord Channel.

The post TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 has the Fastest Growth Ever appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

TrueNAS SCALE “Cobia” 23.10 completed a very successful BETA and RC.1 cycle. We wish to recognize and thank the more than 3,000 community testers that reported bugs and provided invaluable feedback. The pre-release program for Cobia had five times the adoption of previous TrueNAS CORE or SCALE releases. Even with many more testers than ever, relatively few major issues surfaced and those were then quickly resolved.

SMB Features in TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 Release

Server Message Block (SMB) has become the most common file sharing protocol with strong support on Windows, MacOS, iPhone, Android, and Linux clients. SMB features continue to improve with each TrueNAS release and update. In this release version, we’d like to highlight the all-new features in SCALE 23.10:

SMB and NFSv4 Compatibility:
Sharing the same datasets via SMB and NFS requires the two protocols to have compatible ACLs, permissions, and locks. These capabilities have gradually been added to SCALE, and with this version, the final piece of a common locking mechanism with NFSv4 has been added. This is a selectable profile within SMB sharing and can be enabled if desired.

SMB Share import:
Many users install TrueNAS to migrate from any other product that supports the SMB sharing protocol, including Windows, Netapp, and a myriad of other products. TrueNAS can now mount the SMB shares from these systems and pull that data into TrueNAS for sharing again.

SMB File Sync:
We’ve previously described how Syncthing can be used to sync SMB and NFS shares between TrueNAS systems. It also works well for long-distance collaboration, metro-clusters or data migration. With SCALE 23.10, there is also an option to sync with a 3rd party SMB server or storage system.

Fast File Copy:
With the new ZFS Block Cloning capability, copies of SMB and NFS files and directories can be accelerated by 10x or more. When a directory is copied from one data share to another, only the metadata is copied and the data is treated like a snapshot and remains in place. This accelerates necessary file copies and allows the admin to rearrange their data without having to wait hours for copies to complete.

SMB Performance and Scalability:
There have been several changes to the protocol stack to improve performance and scalability. This includes increasing the I/Os per second, the number of users, and the number of files per directory. Both OpenZFS and Samba changes were made to enable these improvements. The improvements are also aligned with work on NVMe performance (more information to follow).

Updated Summary of TrueNAS SCALE 23.10

The TrueNAS SCALE 23.10.0 RELEASE version includes another 200 bug fixes and is feature-complete. The highlights of 23.10 “Cobia” include:

Infrastructure

• Linux Kernel 6.1 and improved Hardware Support
• NVIDIA 535.54.03 Driver Updates
• Netdata backend stats collection
• Scale up to 1200 drives and 25 PB+ on a single system

Web Interface

• Improved Apps UI
• Improved Storage Pool UI
• Simplified feedback and bug reporting

ZFS & Performance Improvements

• OpenZFS 2.2 with many iXsystems contributions
• ZFS Block Cloning (type of deduplication) for faster SMB & NFS file copies
• ZFS dRAID Pool Layouts
• Pause / Unpause ZFS Scrub Controls
• Reduction of HA failover times by up to 70%

Protocols and Services

• Samba security updates and speed improvements
• Simplified SMB cluster expansion via TrueCommand 3.0 (Coming Soon!)
• Importing SMB shares from other systems
• File sync between NFS/SMB systems
• iSCSI improvements including ALUA support
• SMB and NFSv4 Compatibility for common shares

This release version is recommended for early adopters to start until there has been more testing and feedback from the Community. The TrueNAS Software Status Page keeps track of the quality and user-type recommendations.

TrueNAS Enterprise and associated appliances are based on either TrueNAS 13.0 or Bluefin (22.12). Cobia (23.10) has been added and with improvements in quality, flexibility, and security, it will soon replace Bluefin on appliances.

The upcoming TrueCommand 3.0 has full support for Cobia (23.10) and there are limitations using TrueCommand 2.3. If TrueCommand functionality is an operational requirement, it is recommended that the system update should be delayed until TrueCommand 3.0 is available, which is expected by December.

TrueNAS 13.1 Will Inherit Some Cobia Improvements

Now that TrueNAS SCALE Cobia is released, there will be a similar TrueNAS CORE & Enterprise update to TrueNAS 13.1. This update will include the many SMB and ZFS improvements that have been implemented and tested in TrueNAS SCALE Cobia. TrueNAS 13.1 is planned for release in early 2024. Nightly versions have been made available for testers and those who wish to help contribute to TrueNAS development. The link to the nightly versions can be found on the TrueNAS Software Status Page.

TrueNAS 13.1 includes additional features to simplify “sidegrading” from TrueNAS 13.1 to TrueNAS SCALE 23.10, especially for Enterprise HA systems. The ZFS and SMB stack will be well-aligned and the Cobia iSCSI stack includes ALUA. There will be additional information available for TrueNAS 13.1 when it reaches BETA status.

TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.4.2 is the Final Version of Bluefin

TrueNAS SCALE inherited storage functionality and automated testing from CORE. SCALE offers a more robust Apps environment based on Linux, KVM, and Kubernetes. To join the more than 80,000 users already using TrueNAS SCALE, download the installer here or use the System Update feature from within your existing TrueNAS install.

TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.4.2 was released previously on October 13th, 2023. Going forward, TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 Cobia will gradually become the recommended version. No further versions of Bluefin are planned. The first update for Cobia is expected in December 2023, and work has already begun on the next release, codenamed “Dragonfish”.

TrueNAS provides these choices and the ability to automatically migrate storage services and VMs from CORE to SCALE. Plugins and jails can be manually replaced with Apps. We encourage anyone looking for further advice or answers to questions to visit our Community Forums or Discord Channel.

The post TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 is RELEASED with additional SMB Features 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.

The New Cobia WebUI

The SCALE webUI was rearchitected from the CORE webUI to provide a simpler interface, and designed to present only the required information on each page. The “new” WebUI in Cobia is an improvement on the original SCALE webUI. Advanced features are hidden by default, and additional page forms appear as needed. Initial reviews of this modernized and streamlined UI have been very positive.

Within Cobia, there have been several major WebUI improvements that should improve user success and simplify operations:

• Improved Apps Screens
• Reimagined ZFS Storage Dashboard
• New and Improved Pool Creation Wizard
• Built-in Feedback and Bug Reporting

For more detailed information, please visit the new and improved TrueNAS Docs website which includes options for specifying the specific release documentation.

The Improved Apps Screens

With TrueNAS SCALE, each App is effectively a Kubernetes Helm Chart that points to container images and provides configuration information to integrate multiple containers into an application. The Apps are collected together and then made available via Catalogs. The new Apps screens have been significantly improved with better-structured access to all Apps based on category.

The new Discovery screens help with App discovery based on Category, Catalog, Name or even date of last update. After you have found an App, the Information screen provides details of the App and its sources.

Apps can then be installed and monitored. Bulk operations for updating Apps are available. The installed Apps status screen is also new.

Below is an animation of the various functions provided by the Apps Screens.

The reimagined ZFS Storage Dashboard

Every TrueNAS system manages drives (physical and/or virtual) and one or more ZFS pools. As systems get larger, the configuration options expand, and UI needs increase. Cobia was designed to support systems with more than a thousand drives, and the updated Storage Dashboard reflects that capability.

First, there is a new Pool Creation Wizard which greatly simplifies creating pools based on available resources. A pool is constructed by one or more vdevs (drive groups) of different types. The new Pool Creation Wizard includes the ability to automatically select drives for vdevs of a pool based on their size.

If a pool is very large with many data vdevs, the wizard will automatically select the drives for each vdev. Pool creation times have also been improved by up to 90%.

In TrueNAS Enterprise, the algorithm for selection of drives can be configured to group drives together or disperse them across multiple enclosures. With drives spread across multiple enclosures, an entire expansion shelf can fail or be replaced without impacting the pool or system uptime.

After a pool is created, the status of that pool is displayed as a simple dashboard. If there are unassigned disks, they are made available to create a new pool or expand one of the existing pools.

Built-in Feedback and Bug Reporting

Introduced with TrueNAS SCALE Cobia RC.1, the new Feedback and Bug Reporting system introduces major conveniences for providing feedback to iXsystems. At the top of the UI is a “smiley face” icon that can be clicked on:

After clicking on the icon, you can give feedback on the design of the page, add any important details for your use case, and optionally capture a screenshot of the current page. If you encounter a bug you’d like to report, you can click the File Ticket link inside this rating window to instead submit a bug report. In the bug report, please provide a brief summary of the issue, and optionally check the box to Attach Debug, which will collect hardware and software diagnostic files about your system. In response, you will get a TrueNAS ticket link for your bug where you can monitor its status and resolution.

TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.3 is the Current Version

While we encourage testers, early adopters, and enthusiast users to try out the TrueNAS SCALE Cobia early releases and provide feedback, TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.3.3 should be used for any use cases where reliability and primary data retention are required. More than 75,000 users are currently using TrueNAS SCALE and it is available for download here.

TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.4 is planned to be released in early October, and will represent the last major update for the 22.12 release branch. After that, TrueNAS SCALE Cobia will gradually become the recommended version in Q4 2023 and beyond. Bookmark the TrueNAS Software Status page and review when each release lines up with the needs of your workload.

TrueNAS provides these choices and the ability to automatically migrate storage services and VMs from CORE to SCALE. TrueNAS CORE Plugins and jails can be manually replaced with Apps. We encourage anyone looking for further advice or answers to questions to visit our Community Forums or Discord Channel as we democratize enterprise storage together!

The post TrueNAS SCALE Cobia Has a New WebUI appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Today, we are releasing TrueNAS SCALE 23.10-RC.1 and enabling “Distributed RAID” (dRAID) for the first time. OpenZFS dRAID Pool Layouts provides a mechanism for distributing vdev data and parity across every device in a large pool. The benefits include optimal load-balancing across all drives as well as much faster resilver times, which is particularly useful for large drives. This results in greater storage efficiency and reliability for high capacity systems. We are keen to get testing and feedback from the community for this new technology.

The 23.10-RC.1 version includes another 200 bug fixes and improvements and is nearly feature-complete. While it’s not yet a Release version (planned for late October), the evidence is pointing to the RC1 version approaching the quality we are aiming for. We’ll report back to the community as we get feedback on this RC1 version.

Built-in Feedback and Bug Reporting

TrueNAS SCALE Cobia RC1 also introduces major conveniences for providing feedback to iXsystems. At the top of the page is a “smiley face” icon to encourage feedback.

After clicking on the icon, you can give feedback on the design of the page and add any important details for your use case. If you have a bug to report, then click the File Ticket link and submit a bug report, which will include automatically collected information about your system. In response, you will get a TrueNAS ticket link for your bug where you can monitor its status and resolution

Summary of TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 Features

The highlights of 23.10 “Cobia” include:

• OpenZFS 2.2 with many iXsystems contributions
• Linux Kernel 6.1 and improved Hardware Support
• NVIDIA 535.54.03 Driver Updates
• Improved Apps UI
• Improved Storage Pool UI
• ZFS Block Cloning (Deduplication) for faster SMB & NFS file copies
• ZFS dRAID Pool Layouts
• Netdata backend stats collection
• Samba update and speed improvements
• Simplified SMB cluster expansion via TrueCommand 3.0 (Coming Soon!)
• Importing SMB shares from other systems (Release version)
• Scale up to 1200 drives and 25PB+ on a single system
• iSCSI improvements including ALUA support
• Simplified feedback and bug reporting
• Pause / Unpause ZFS Scrub Controls
• Reduction of HA failover times by up to 70%

For this RC1 release, we recommend that only testers and early adopters use this version until there has been more feedback from the Community. The TrueNAS Software Status Page will keep track of the quality and user-type recommendation of the release.

TrueNAS Enterprise and associated appliances are based on either TrueNAS 13.0 or Bluefin (22.12). Cobia (23.10) will be added as an option after its formal release in Q4 this year.

How Do TrueNAS 13.0 Users Benefit?

After TrueNAS SCALE Cobia is released, there will be a TrueNAS CORE & Enterprise update to TrueNAS 13.1. This will include many SMB and ZFS improvements that have been tested in Cobia. This TrueNAS 13.1 release is planned for early 2024. Nightly versions have been made available for testing.

TrueNAS 13.1 includes additional features to simplify “sidegrading” from TrueNAS 13.1 to Cobia, especially for Enterprise HA systems. The ZFS and SMB stack will be well aligned and the Cobia iSCSI stack will include ALUA. There will be additional information available on TrueNAS 13.1 when it reaches BETA status.

TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.3 is still the Current Version

TrueNAS SCALE has inherited the storage functionality and automated testing from CORE. SCALE offers a more robust Apps environment based on Linux, KVM, and Kubernetes. The latest release, TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.3.3, has significantly improved quality and reliability. More than 75,000 users are currently using TrueNAS SCALE and it is available for download here.

There will be a TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.4 version released in October. After that TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 will gradually become the recommended version.

TrueNAS provides these choices and the ability to automatically migrate storage services and VMs from CORE to SCALE. Plugins and jails can be manually replaced with Apps. We encourage anyone looking for further advice or answers to questions to visit our Community Forums or Discord Channel.

The post TrueNAS SCALE 23.10-RC.1 Introduces dRAID appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Bluefin (22.12) has been a very successful release and has grown the SCALE user base to about 70,000 systems in less than 18 months. The quality of Bluefin keeps increasing with community testing and has reached General Availability (GA) status, with iXsystems shipping nearly all platforms with Bluefin or TrueNAS 13.0. Our goal has been to give users the freedom to choose their path.

Cobia (23.10) is the alphabetic and chronological successor to Bluefin (22.12). It is also the first release designed to enable the sidegrade from TrueNAS 13.0 HA systems. Cobia has been through two Alpha stages with the development community and has reached the point where Community testers can begin to explore what is new. It will not be ready for production until Q4, as the 23.10 name (yy.mm of target release date) indicates.

TrueNAS Enterprise and associated appliances can be based on TrueNAS 13.0 or Bluefin (22.12). Cobia (23.10) will be added as an option after its formal release in Q4 this year.

What’s New In TrueNAS SCALE Cobia?

A heck of a lot! Rather than go through every enhancement in detail, we’ll provide a quick overview and share the specifics of key Cobia features in future blogs. Some of the highlights include:

• OpenZFS 2.2 with many iXsystems contributions
• Linux Kernel 6.1 and improved Hardware Support
• NVIDIA 535.54.03 Driver Updates
• Improved Apps UI
• Improved Storage Pool UI
• ZFS Block Cloning (Deduplication) for SMB & NFS file copies
• ZFS dRAID Pool Layouts (Coming Soon!)
• Netdata backend stats collection
• Samba update and speed improvements
• Simplified SMB cluster expansion via TrueCommand (Coming Soon!)
• Importing of SMB shares from other systems (Coming Soon to Apps!)
• Scale up to 1200 drives and 25PB+ on a single system
• iSCSI improvements including ALUA support
• Simplified feedback and bug reporting
• Pause / Unpause ZFS Scrub Controls

In total, there are over 1,000 fixes and improvements from Bluefin to Cobia. That is a lot of change to manage, so we have had two ALPHA releases and have added more test cases to the automated QA process. For this initial BETA release, we recommend that only developers and testers use this version, until there has been more feedback from the Community. The TrueNAS Software Status Page will keep track of the quality and user-type recommendation of the release.

Cobia Uses Linux Kernel 6.1 with LTS

Each new version of TrueNAS uses the latest stable and well-supported version of the underlying OS. The decision on which version is finalized well before the 1st ALPHA software version. In this case, we chose Kernel 6.1 early this year. Linux Kernel 6.1 has its own set of improvements, plus support for new hardware.

In addition, we added the later NVIDIA 535.54.03 driver, which includes improved support for late and early GPUs.

The New and Improved Apps UI

With TrueNAS SCALE, each App is effectively a Kubernetes Helm Chart that points to container images and provides configuration information to integrate multiple containers into an application. This makes Apps simple to deploy and run on TrueNAS SCALE. In Cobia, the safety belt of host path validation has been reduced to a warning when App data is shared via SMB or NFS.

The Apps are collected together and then made available via Catalogs. The new App UI has been significantly improved with better-structured access to all Apps based on category.

How Do TrueNAS 13.0 Users Benefit?

TrueNAS SCALE is the software edition where new features and updated components are developed and tested. Once those are tested and validated, many are eligible for backporting to TrueNAS CORE. The focus of TrueNAS CORE is maintaining storage reliability and security.

After TrueNAS SCALE Cobia is released, there will be an update to TrueNAS CORE 13.1. This will include many SMB and ZFS improvements that have been tested in Cobia. This TrueNAS 13.1 release should be expected in early 2024.

TrueNAS 13.1 includes additional features to simplify “sidegrading” from TrueNAS 13.1 to Cobia, especially for HA systems. The ZFS and SMB stack will be well aligned and the Cobia iSCSI stack will include ALUA. There will be additional information available on TrueNAS 13.1 when it reaches BETA status.

TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.3 is the Current Version

TrueNAS SCALE has inherited the storage functionality and automated testing from CORE. SCALE is maturing rapidly and also offers a more robust Apps environment based on Linux, KVM, and Kubernetes. SCALE is generally recommended for new users that need embedded Applications . The latest, TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.3.3, has significantly improved quality and reliability. It should be used for any use cases where reliability and primary data retention are required. More than 70,000 users are currently using TrueNAS SCALE and it is available for download here.

There will be a TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.4 version released in September. After that TrueNAS SCALE Cobia will gradually become the recommended version.

TrueNAS provides these choices and the ability to automatically migrate storage services and VMs from CORE to SCALE. Plugins and jails can be manually replaced with Apps. We encourage anyone looking for further advice or answers to questions to visit our Community Forums or Discord Channel.

This is the first instance of “Applications” rather than “Apps”. Suggest either ‘applications’ in running text or ‘Apps’ as the UI equivalent

The post TrueNAS SCALE Cobia Has Reached BETA appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

UPDATE:  After release, a minor update to TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.3.1 was provided. This update included a few bug fixes, including a PCI-pass-though virtualization bug.

TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.2 was a significant release with its new Enterprise feature pack and the option of Gold / Silver / Bronze Enterprise support, which are now both available for SCALE. The Enterprise feature pack includes HA (dual controllers), Proactive Monitoring, Enclosure Management, and many other features and tools that ensure a highly reliable deployment in production environments.

TrueNAS 22.12.3 adds official (WebUI) support for SMB Multichannel and increases maturity and quality. SMB multichannel is used where systems have multiple LAN interfaces and can take advantage of more bandwidth than a single LAN interface. A customer can aggregate 4 x 1GbE ports, 2 x 10GbE ports, or 2 x 25GbE ports on TrueNAS. The resulting multichannel connection uses the aggregate bandwidth and makes more efficient use of  the client’s CPU by reducing the dependence on the performance of a single processor core.

After upgrading to TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.3, SMB Multichannel can be enabled from the (SMB Service Screen) menu by toggling the “Enable SMB Multichannel” option. For additional information on system configuration and requirements, visit the TrueNAS SCALE SMB Documentation page.

SCALE 22.12.3 Squashes Bugs

This third update (22.12.3) includes many significant improvements and bug fixes that are listed in the release notes. Highlights include:

• App reliability: There have been numerous cases where Apps have not reliably restarted after reboots and upgrades. A kernel/kubernetes race condition has been found and fixed.
• Samba update: Samba has been updated from 4.17.5 to 4.17.8. This includes about a dozen bug fixes and corrects several security CVEs.
• NVDIMM: Earlier versions of NVDIMM firmware prematurely predicted End-of-life for the NVDIMM. The latest version reduces these alerts and simplifies the firmware update process.
• 100+ Bug Fixes (most are minor) with several having a significant impact on system usability

In addition to the bug fixes, there are several security CVEs that have been addressed. There is also an update to the TrueNAS security page to improve searchability and navigation. More information is also available in this recent blog post.

Recently, we’ve provided additional tools for creating and distributing a much larger collection of Apps. These tools (Catalogs and Trains on Github) are improving the general user experience with Apps and we’re looking forward to continuing this progress.

SCALE 22.12.3 Prepares for Cobia

The next version of TrueNAS SCALE will be called Cobia, another fish, and starting with “C”. Cobia is currently in its internal Alpha stage and will get to BETA in CY Q3 2023. It will be a very exciting release with more information forthcoming next quarter. Some early testers have been using TrueNAS SCALE nightly builds while the development team is busily preparing for BETA status.

TrueNAS SCALE Cobia is going to improve its security posture and reduce the number of attack vectors. Part of this is reducing the number of built-in services and choosing to have them deployed as Apps. Apps — run as Kubernetes pods — have much more constrained access to the host system, and can only access the specified datasets provided to them. This improves system security and, in the end, provides greater flexibility for TrueNAS deployments. Each App can represent a different tenant or use-case.

Where services are being deprecated in favor of Apps, TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin will now report warnings to users in these cases. Where possible, users should migrate their Bluefin systems to use the substitute Apps and disable the internal services. This will allow for simpler updates to Cobia.

Examples of the Services that will become Apps are:

• Rsync Host App: The built-in rsync host capability in TrueNAS will be replaced by an official SCALE App. The built-in rsync task UI and the ability to rsync over SSH will be maintained.
• OpenVPN App: Complex VPN needs are best addressed by external firewall products, though we understand that TrueNAS SCALE is often leveraged to provide an endpoint for some VPN solutions. Where needed, Apps will be available for several VPN software products, such as OpenVPN, Tailscale, Wireguard, Zerotier, and more.
• Minio App: The Minio S3 target apps can be embedded or run as an App. We’ve been improving the App model and find it is more flexible for Enterprise deployments. Multiple copies of the Minio App can be run with different erasure coding groups and policies, allowing for additional flexibility in redundancy choices.
• FTP, TFTP, DynDNS, and WebDav Apps: These services are not commonly used and are more securely provided by Apps.

Plans for 4th Bluefin Update

The quality of Bluefin is maturing rapidly at this stage of the software development lifecycle. It is now suitable for Enterprise users with less mission-critical applications. The iX team is already working on the fourth (and likely final) update to Bluefin with a target release in September. This will include primarily bug fixes and CVEs only. Beyond that, Cobia will be the focus for both quality and security improvements.

Joining the School of Bluefin

As always, CORE users can “sidegrade” to SCALE when the time is right for them. SCALE Bluefin is an easy upgrade from SCALE Angelfish and is recommended for all users at this time. For more conservative users, the software status of TrueNAS editions is tracked here. There is also a comprehensive list of Bluefin changes in the release notes.

We want to thank the TrueNAS Community for the tremendous support in improving TrueNAS SCALE quality. It has been an exciting ride, and there is much more to come, so please keep making suggestions and reporting bugs as we continue to improve the quality and functionality of TrueNAS SCALE together. We’re also very excited to see more developers contributing to SCALE and collaborating via our Discord channel.  The more the merrier!

Want to learn more about TrueNAS SCALE solutions in your business? Contact us to speak to a Product Specialist.

The post TrueNAS SCALE “Bluefin” adds SMB Multichannel and Quality with 3rd Update 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.

The post May Newsletter: Supercharge Your Storage with TrueNAS SCALE Apps 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

The post TrueNAS as a Storage Server for VMware/Hyper-V appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

With TrueNAS SCALE, each App is effectively a Kubernetes Helm Chart that points to container images and provides configuration information to integrate multiple containers into an application. This makes Apps simple to deploy and run on TrueNAS SCALE. The Apps are collected together and then made available via Catalogs.

There is a default TrueNAS Catalog as well as the ability to load any number of unsupported 3rd party Catalogs and install Apps from their collections. Within each Catalog, there can be multiple groupings or “Trains” of Applications. Apps from different Catalogs can run on the same TrueNAS system.

More recently with the update of TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin, 22.12.2, we are pleased to roll out a new set of Apps to our existing TrueNAS Catalog. After updating to 22.12.2, users will see new Apps trains available in the UI, defined by their label names:

Community is our new Train of Apps that are either iX or Community-contributed. These Apps are generally considered “Community” supported, and iX will help to review and moderate changes being submitted by community users, but not directly provide support. This is a great place for aspiring App developers to collaborate on bringing new software packages to SCALE, either by the original developers of 3rd party software, or the supporting fan community.

Official has been the primary Train for Apps up until this point. Going forward, these Apps will be the ones that are periodically tested and maintained by TrueNAS engineers, and major issues will be investigated as they arise. Applications that begin life in the Community Train may over time migrate into the Official Train if they are high-quality and very actively used by TrueNAS users.

Enterprise is an exclusive Train for TrueNAS Enterprise appliances made up of Applications which are tested, maintained, documented, and generally have more enterprise functionality for mission-critical use cases on TrueNAS. Software vendors of Enterprise Applications may wish to contact iXsystems to discuss the inclusion of their App(s) in this Enterprise Train.

With the upcoming 22.12.3 release, we will further improve the naming in the UI and change the “Official” Catalog label to “TrueNAS” Catalog label. This will help to better differentiate between which Catalog of Apps are being used, and which Train an App belongs to within the Catalog.

With these changes now live in 22.12.2, we are now open to collaboration with other App developers on our TrueNAS Apps Catalog hosted on GitHub. Users are encouraged to follow along with incoming changes staged as pull requests, as well as suggestions for new Applications. Aspiring developers can also read through our documentation on App creation and help review pull requests in-flight to ensure the latest and greatest Applications are always available on TrueNAS SCALE for all to run and enjoy.

Here is the current list of Apps in the TrueNAS Catalog:

TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.2 is Now Available

TrueNAS SCALE has inherited the storage functionality and automated testing from CORE. SCALE is maturing rapidly, and also offers a more robust Apps environment based on Linux, KVM, and Kubernetes. For that reason, SCALE is generally recommended for new users that need embedded Applications. The latest TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.2 has made significant strides in quality and reliability. Over 5,000 users successfully updated within 48 hours of its release and it is available for download here.

TrueNAS provides these choices and the ability to automatically migrate storage services and VMs from CORE to SCALE. Plugins and jails can be manually replaced with Apps. We encourage anyone looking for further advice or answers to questions to visit our Community Forums or Discord Channel.

The post Leveling Up TrueNAS SCALE Apps and Catalogs appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

The post TrueNAS SCALE gets Enterprise Features appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

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.

TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.1 is the first maintenance update to 22.12.0, with over 300 improvements and bug fixes. Users still on the previous version (Angelfish) also have a simple update when using the same features and following the release notes. After a couple of weeks of community testing, we expect to recommend users to update their Angelfish and Bluefin systems to this latest release.

Bluefin Update Improves Stability and Reliability

TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin inherits all the functional capabilities of Angelfish and adds many new features. This first update (22.12.1) includes many significant improvements and bug fixes that are listed in the release notes. Highlights include:

• Performance Improvements to further optimize various storage protocol workloads
• SMB Share Proxy provides a redirect mechanism for making many TrueNAS SMB shares available in a common namespace presented by one TrueNAS system. This reduces the configuration needed for each SMB client.
• Sudo fields are added to replication tasks to provide the correct privileges on remote targets.
• Kubernetes Pass-through is provided with an Enterprise license and enables external orchestrators to control the Kubernetes API functionality within a node.
• SSH Key Upload simplifies administration on TrueNAS via multiple users.
• Rootless Login Bug Fixes & Improvements simplify administration by non-root users.
• Validate Host Path in the SCALE UI is improved for the specific safety belt that warns of possible conflicts between Apps and sharing.
• ZFS HotPlug Fixes and Other Improvements are provided through an update to OpenZFS 2.1.9.
• 250 Bug Fixes (most are minor) with several having a significant impact on system reliability. After more community testing, we expect to recommend SCALE users to upgrade.
• TrueNAS Mini R is a new 12 bay TrueNAS Mini platform with added enclosure management UI.

Plans for 2nd Update

At this stage of the software development lifecycle, the quality of Bluefin is improving rapidly but is not yet recommended for Enterprise users with mission-critical applications. The iX team is already working on the second update to Bluefin with a target release at the end of March. This update is intended to address some of the needs for Enterprise use-cases.

There were some reports from the community of Kubernetes / applications being unreliable at deployment of 22.12.0. Some of these are addressed in this 1st update, and once deployed, any remaining issues will be diagnosed and addressed in the 2nd update. We appreciate the Community reporting bugs and helping iX replicate the issues, whether they are configuration or software related.

After the 2nd update, we plan to provide a more detailed view of the next major TrueNAS SCALE release train: Cobia. One major anticipated change is a capability in the Apps UI to sort and filter available applications when using large or multiple application catalogs.

Joining the School of Bluefin

Bluefin is an easy upgrade from SCALE Angelfish and is recommended for testers and early adopters. For more conservative users, the software status of TrueNAS editions is tracked here. There is also an enormous list of Bluefin changes available in the release notes, which includes over 1,300 improvements and fixes.

We want to thank the community for the tremendous support in improving TrueNAS SCALE quality. It has been an exciting ride and there is much more to come, so please keep making suggestions and reporting bugs as we continue to improve the quality of TrueNAS SCALE together.

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

The post TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin gets its First Update 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.

Updated 4/15/2024
NOTE: Due to RedHat’s decision to stop maintaining the upstream Gluster project, the TrueNAS SCALE gluster functionality has been deprecated. The gluster clustering feature is disabled in TrueCommand 3.0 and later. Further, TrueNAS SCALE 24.04 has removed the deprecated gluster backend. Systems installed with SCALE 24.04 (Dragonfish) or newer will be unable to use the deprecated gluster clustering feature. Other clustering features such as Minio and Syncthing are unimpacted.

TrueNAS SCALE was released on “Twosday” 2/22/22. Since this time, tens of thousands of users adopted it as a single node hyperconverged system with unified storage, containers, and VMs. In parallel, development and testing of scale-out capabilities has progressed well, and the Release of SCALE 22.12 (Bluefin) significantly improves the clustering and scale-out options.

In this blog we share a technical overview of how TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin uses clustering technologies and what the user benefits are.

What is clustering?

Every compute or storage system is based on processors, memory, and some amount of storage, typically in a single enclosure with its own power supplies and fans. It’s possible to scale-up these systems by using larger processors and more RAM. The storage capacity can also scale-up by adding drives and even expansion shelves (JBODs).  However, there is a scalability limit that is eventually reached. Beyond that limit, scale-out technologies are used to break these barriers.

The feasible limit for scale-up storage based on today’s hardware technology is up to about  64 cores, 1 TB RAM and up to 1200 drives of 18 TB each. That is over 20 petabytes (PB) of raw storage! A two-node cluster of controllers can be used to deliver High Availability (HA). While 20 PB is a huge amount of data for individuals or small businesses, there are many large organizations that have to manage hundreds of PBs to even Exabytes of data.

Scale-out storage allows growth from 20 PB to an Exabyte by combining many systems (nodes) into a cluster. A cluster can have a hundred nodes across which an architect can deploy additional CPU cores, RAM, drive counts, network bandwidth, and storage capacity. From the user or the client perspective, the cluster appears as a single, larger, and more scalable system.

The scale-out cluster can also be more reliable than a single system. A node can be taken down or removed from the cluster without interrupting client storage operations. This increases service and application availability, which can be very important, allowing TrueNAS SCALE to enable extreme Availability as it matures.

Clusters are techniques for enabling massive capacity, bandwidth, and availability by aggregating systems or nodes. It should be noted that clusters do not decrease latency or individual client performance. They consume additional resources to coordinate data between the nodes, proving that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

What are the types of TrueNAS SCALE clustering?

There are several types of clustering. Each type of clustering has a mixture of different benefits and tradeoffs. The best deployment configuration will always depend on the specific requirements. TrueNAS SCALE is unique in that it offers choice among several types of clustering and also allows users to start using it as a single, discrete node. By contrast, most clustered storage solutions have limited clustering options. Based on erasure coding, a minimum of three nodes are required to get started.

Shared Storage Clusters

One type of clustering known as shared storage clusters are built such that all nodes have access to the same storage pool. If one node fails, the other nodes have access to the storage and can carry on. These are well suited for modest size systems with more processing needs (e.g., databases) or high availability (HA) requirements. As compared to shared-nothing clusters, the capacity of the shared storage pool is smaller.

TrueNAS SCALE uses a shared storage model to support HA systems. Two nodes are used to manage a shared ZFS pool. If one node fails, the other node can take over the responsibilities.  This improves the reliability of a system from 99.9% to 99.999%.

The primary benefit of shared storage is that data does not have to be replicated between nodes. The data is efficiently supported in a standard ZFS pool. This reduces the cost of reliable storage by as much as 50% while also providing the best single client latency and bandwidth for storage consumers. The capacity and reliability limit for this clustered layout for TrueNAS is a little over 20 PB.

Shared storage HA requires significant platform customization to make it reliable and is only available as TrueNAS Appliances. TrueNAS SCALE can be used on the TrueNAS M-Series platform and deliver HA for both storage services and for its VMs and container workloads.

Shared-nothing Clusters

Shared-nothing Clusters is the term used for clusters where the storage is dedicated to each node. The advantage of this architecture is that it can scale-out to much larger systems. These are the techniques used by Google, Facebook, and Apple to handle their massive datasets. There are several types of scale-out or shared nothing clusters:

Federated clusters use some form of common directory service to aggregate systems. Each system is responsible for its own data. Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is used for NFS. iSNS is used for iSCSI. SMB storage can be coordinated with Active Directory (AD). Federation solves some administration problems, but does not scale-out smoothly with each dataset typically constrained to a single system. This would more commonly be used by downstream Applications with their own forms of redundancy and load balancing between the federated nodes.

Scale-out Clusters are typically based on Erasure Coding. Datasets can span many nodes, and clusters can grow linearly. Erasure-coded clusters take each piece of data and code it in N chunks. The coding is such that one or more chunks can be lost and the data can still be restored. Erasure-coding is very robust and efficient. Instead of replicating all data, only 20-50% additional data is usually required. This type of clustering will enable maximum storage capacity, availability and redundancy, but at the cost of individual client bandwidth and latency. TrueNAS SCALE supports erasure-coding with both glusterfs “dispersed-mode” and with Minio erasure coding for S3 compatible object storage.

TrueNAS SCALE supports many types of Clustering

As described above, TrueNAS SCALE supports many types of clustering approaches. The best clustering approach depends on the specific protocols and the use-case requirements.

The following table attempts to summarize the clustering modes available for the different protocols.

Clustering Efficiency and Performance

Calculating the impact of clustering on capacity and performance can become more complex than expected. As you add nodes and drives, capacity and performance increases, while at the same time, the efficiency of those nodes decreases. Clustering protocols require CPU and networking resources to manage the cluster.

The following chart provides rough estimates on the efficiency of the nodes and their drives for different clustering models. HA systems are very efficient and should be used if the workload is not too large. Erasure-coded clusters grow capacity more quickly than performance. It’s very much like ZFS pools with RAID-Z vdevs.

Clustering Features

ZFS has many data optimization and protection features that are used on scale-up systems. TrueNAS SCALE supports all of those existing scale-up features. Some of those features are redone when scale-out clusters are used:

Online Growth is provided via the addition of groups of nodes. The size of the group is generally 2 for a mirror layout or the size of the erasure code (3-10). It is simpler to manage if nodes are similar in size and performance. TrueNAS SCALE has the fundamental APIs to enable this, and there is ongoing work to build simpler tools in TrueCommand.

Node replacement is provided via TrueCommand 2.3 and 22.12 Bluefin.. If a node is failing or otherwise needs to be replaced, a simple process can be followed to replace the faulted  node. Data is then automatically healed as required until the cluster is back to normal operating state.

The Evolution of TrueNAS SCALE

TrueNAS SCALE Angelfish was the first version of TrueNAS SCALE, and as of the update of this blog in December 2022 over 30,000 TrueNAS Community users have participated and tested on their widely varying hardware platforms and VMs. This Angelfish version introduced gluster for scale-out ZFS file services and clustered Minio for scale-out S3 service.

TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin is the current version. It reached RELEASE on December 13, 2022. Bluefin includes improved clustering with simpler node replacements.

TrueNAS SCALE Cobia will be the next version. It will have many enhancements and is expected to be released later in 2023.

We welcome developers and testers to continue to participate in this process. Increasing the quality and reliability of each release is a primary goal. Please contact iX if you are looking for more information on how to develop, test, or use TrueNAS SCALE.

The post TrueNAS SCALE Clustering Overview appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Updated 4/15/2024
NOTE: Due to RedHat’s decision to stop maintaining the upstream Gluster project, the TrueNAS SCALE gluster functionality has been deprecated. The gluster clustering feature is disabled in TrueCommand 3.0 and later. Further, TrueNAS SCALE 24.04 has removed the deprecated gluster backend. Systems installed with SCALE 24.04 (Dragonfish) or newer will be unable to use the deprecated gluster clustering feature. Other clustering features such as Minio and Syncthing are unimpacted.

TrueNAS SCALE was released on “Twosday” 2/22/22. Since this time, tens of thousands of users adopted it as a single node hyperconverged system with unified storage, containers, and VMs. In parallel, development and testing of scale-out capabilities has progressed well, and the Release of SCALE 22.12 (Bluefin) significantly improves the clustering and scale-out options. In this blog we share a technical overview of how TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin uses clustering technologies and what the user benefits are.

What is clustering?

Every compute or storage system is based on processors, memory, and some amount of storage, typically in a single enclosure with its own power supplies and fans. It’s possible to scale-up these systems by using larger processors and more RAM. The storage capacity can also scale-up by adding drives and even expansion shelves (JBODs).  However, there is a scalability limit that is eventually reached. Beyond that limit, scale-out technologies are used to break these barriers. The feasible limit for scale-up storage based on today’s hardware technology is up to about  64 cores, 1 TB RAM and up to 1200 drives of 18 TB each. That is over 20 petabytes (PB) of raw storage! A two-node cluster of controllers can be used to deliver High Availability (HA). While 20 PB is a huge amount of data for individuals or small businesses, there are many large organizations that have to manage hundreds of PBs to even Exabytes of data. Scale-out storage allows growth from 20 PB to an Exabyte by combining many systems (nodes) into a cluster. A cluster can have a hundred nodes across which an architect can deploy additional CPU cores, RAM, drive counts, network bandwidth, and storage capacity. From the user or the client perspective, the cluster appears as a single, larger, and more scalable system. The scale-out cluster can also be more reliable than a single system. A node can be taken down or removed from the cluster without interrupting client storage operations. This increases service and application availability, which can be very important, allowing TrueNAS SCALE to enable extreme Availability as it matures. Clusters are techniques for enabling massive capacity, bandwidth, and availability by aggregating systems or nodes. It should be noted that clusters do not decrease latency or individual client performance. They consume additional resources to coordinate data between the nodes, proving that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

What are the types of TrueNAS SCALE clustering?

There are several types of clustering. Each type of clustering has a mixture of different benefits and tradeoffs. The best deployment configuration will always depend on the specific requirements. TrueNAS SCALE is unique in that it offers choice among several types of clustering and also allows users to start using it as a single, discrete node. By contrast, most clustered storage solutions have limited clustering options. Based on erasure coding, a minimum of three nodes are required to get started.

Shared Storage Clusters

One type of clustering known as shared storage clusters are built such that all nodes have access to the same storage pool. If one node fails, the other nodes have access to the storage and can carry on. These are well suited for modest size systems with more processing needs (e.g., databases) or high availability (HA) requirements. As compared to shared-nothing clusters, the capacity of the shared storage pool is smaller. TrueNAS SCALE uses a shared storage model to support HA systems. Two nodes are used to manage a shared ZFS pool. If one node fails, the other node can take over the responsibilities.  This improves the reliability of a system from 99.9% to 99.999%. The primary benefit of shared storage is that data does not have to be replicated between nodes. The data is efficiently supported in a standard ZFS pool. This reduces the cost of reliable storage by as much as 50% while also providing the best single client latency and bandwidth for storage consumers. The capacity and reliability limit for this clustered layout for TrueNAS is a little over 20 PB. Shared storage HA requires significant platform customization to make it reliable and is only available as TrueNAS Appliances. TrueNAS SCALE can be used on the TrueNAS M-Series platform and deliver HA for both storage services and for its VMs and container workloads.

Shared-nothing Clusters

Shared-nothing Clusters is the term used for clusters where the storage is dedicated to each node. The advantage of this architecture is that it can scale-out to much larger systems. These are the techniques used by Google, Facebook, and Apple to handle their massive datasets. There are several types of scale-out or shared nothing clusters: Federated clusters use some form of common directory service to aggregate systems. Each system is responsible for its own data. Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is used for NFS. iSNS is used for iSCSI. SMB storage can be coordinated with Active Directory (AD). Federation solves some administration problems, but does not scale-out smoothly with each dataset typically constrained to a single system. This would more commonly be used by downstream Applications with their own forms of redundancy and load balancing between the federated nodes. Scale-out Clusters are typically based on Erasure Coding. Datasets can span many nodes, and clusters can grow linearly. Erasure-coded clusters take each piece of data and code it in N chunks. The coding is such that one or more chunks can be lost and the data can still be restored. Erasure-coding is very robust and efficient. Instead of replicating all data, only 20-50% additional data is usually required. This type of clustering will enable maximum storage capacity, availability and redundancy, but at the cost of individual client bandwidth and latency. TrueNAS SCALE supports erasure-coding with both glusterfs “dispersed-mode” and with Minio erasure coding for S3 compatible object storage.

TrueNAS SCALE supports many types of Clustering

As described above, TrueNAS SCALE supports many types of clustering approaches. The best clustering approach depends on the specific protocols and the use-case requirements. The following table attempts to summarize the clustering modes available for the different protocols.

Clustering Efficiency and Performance

Calculating the impact of clustering on capacity and performance can become more complex than expected. As you add nodes and drives, capacity and performance increases, while at the same time, the efficiency of those nodes decreases. Clustering protocols require CPU and networking resources to manage the cluster. The following chart provides rough estimates on the efficiency of the nodes and their drives for different clustering models. HA systems are very efficient and should be used if the workload is not too large. Erasure-coded clusters grow capacity more quickly than performance. It’s very much like ZFS pools with RAID-Z vdevs.

Clustering Features

ZFS has many data optimization and protection features that are used on scale-up systems. TrueNAS SCALE supports all of those existing scale-up features. Some of those features are redone when scale-out clusters are used: Online Growth is provided via the addition of groups of nodes. The size of the group is generally 2 for a mirror layout or the size of the erasure code (3-10). It is simpler to manage if nodes are similar in size and performance. TrueNAS SCALE has the fundamental APIs to enable this, and there is ongoing work to build simpler tools in TrueCommand. Node replacement is provided via TrueCommand 2.3 and 22.12 Bluefin.. If a node is failing or otherwise needs to be replaced, a simple process can be followed to replace the faulted  node. Data is then automatically healed as required until the cluster is back to normal operating state.

The Evolution of TrueNAS SCALE

TrueNAS SCALE Angelfish was the first version of TrueNAS SCALE, and as of the update of this blog in December 2022 over 30,000 TrueNAS Community users have participated and tested on their widely varying hardware platforms and VMs. This Angelfish version introduced gluster for scale-out ZFS file services and clustered Minio for scale-out S3 service. TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin is the current version. It reached RELEASE on December 13, 2022. Bluefin includes improved clustering with simpler node replacements. TrueNAS SCALE Cobia will be the next version. It will have many enhancements and is expected to be released later in 2023. We welcome developers and testers to continue to participate in this process. Increasing the quality and reliability of each release is a primary goal. Please contact iX if you are looking for more information on how to develop, test, or use TrueNAS SCALE.

The post TrueNAS SCALE Clustering Overview appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

TrueNAS SCALE was designed around this evolved definition with better support for apps, VMs, and networks. Linux, Kubernetes, and containers provide the key technologies for enabling next-generation NAS.

Embedded Applications within a NAS system give users the ability to consolidate platforms, reduce costs, simplify administration, and accelerate the application performance by eliminating protocol and networking layers. This is the basis for Hyperconvergence, whether it is a single node, HA pair, or a scale-out cluster.

With the pre-Christmas release of TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin on December 13th, the support for Apps for TrueNAS has become even better. TrueNAS users now can build even more sophisticated and powerful systems with traditional NAS functionality and embedded applications. These applications can be either task-oriented like Plex and Nextcloud, or storage-oriented like Syncthing. This blog discusses Apps for TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin and all the tools provided.

TrueNAS SCALE Apps are Powerful

With TrueNAS SCALE Angelfish (22.02.4), VMs and Kubernetes Apps can co-exist. Angelfish features include:

Helm Charts: Apps can be built as multi-container pods with user-configurable parameters.

Graphical App Web UI: Deployment and management of Apps are done with a powerful graphical UI that simplifies operations for users with a Mac or Windows background. The goal of SCALE is to make the otherwise complex functionality of embedded applications simple to operate.

Docker Container Integration: Applications from Docker Hub and other repositories can be downloaded and run with simplicity.

3rd Party App Catalogs: Third-party Catalogs enable the organization of Apps, and have pushed the number of available Applications for TrueNAS SCALE well over a thousand.

GPU Support: Apps like Plex can use integrated or add-on GPUs for transcoding and other GPU-driven tasks.

Reliable updates: An inherent advantage of Docker containers is the management of software dependencies. This simplifies updates and upgrades, and is a major improvement over TrueNAS CORE plugins.

TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin: Apps get Even Better

TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin (22.12) takes Apps on SCALE to the next level with a suite of new capabilities:

OverlayFS:  OverlayFS support within OpenZFS enables greatly reduced overhead when running Container workloads.

Wireguard VPN access: A Wireguard App enables other Apps and storage services to be accessible remotely to users running Wireguard clients.  This app is in process and is expected to be available in the coming weeks.

Increased GPU support: Alderlake CPU and Geforce-30XX GPUs have been added to the GPU compatibility list.

Bulk updates: All Apps can now be updated with the single click of a button. This feature is only possible because updating Linux containers is inherently reliable.

Docker Compose App: This App enables existing Docker Compose configs to be easily ported to TrueNAS. Additionally, Portainer can also be deployed and used to manage containers. An official version of this App is planned to be available by Q2 of 2023.

Kubernetes API exposure: For Enterprise users, Kubernetes APIs will eventually be exposed so that external K8s management systems can be used with TrueNAS SCALE.

Cluster CSI drivers: Enterprise users can also use a Democratic or Kadalu CSI driver to automatically provision TrueNAS SCALE scale-up or scale-out storage for Kubernetes clusters.

Overall, the Apps functionality of TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin represents a major step forward relative to both Angelfish and TrueNAS CORE 13.0.

TrueNAS Provides Choice

TrueNAS provides a choice between editions, CORE and SCALE, each with its own benefits.

Users with traditional storage-specific NAS requirements (NFS, SMB, iSCSI, and S3) are still advised to choose TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise. These choices have five times more data under management and many more years of operation and stability. Currently, TrueNAS 13.0-U3 (CORE & Enterprise) is the most robust scale-up storage platform for general use. Jails are supported and if necessary, Plugins are available.

TrueNAS SCALE has inherited the storage functionality and automated testing from CORE. SCALE is maturing rapidly, and also offers a more robust Apps environment based on Linux, KVM, and Kubernetes. For that reason, SCALE is generally recommended for new users that need embedded applications.

TrueNAS provides these choices and an ability to automatically migrate storage services and VMs from CORE to SCALE. Plugins and jails can be manually replaced with Apps. We encourage anyone looking for further advice or answers to questions to visit our Community Forums or Discord Channel.

The post TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin delivers a very “Appy” Christmas appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

TrueNAS SCALE Angelfish (22.02.4) successfully introduced a Linux base, Containers, and Clustering to TrueNAS, enabling over 40,000 systems in less than 1 year. Bluefin will build on this solid foundation and expand to many more use cases and deployments. We expect Bluefin will pass 100,000 deployments and 2 Exabytes of data in 2023.

Bluefin is a simple update to Angelfish, with more polish and numerous bug fixes. Angelfish users will have a simple update when using the same features. Bluefin will then also provide a wide range of new capabilities that will go through the normal software lifecycle to maturity.

Bluefin Features Expand the Opportunities

Bluefin inherits all the functional capabilities of Angelfish and also includes many new features, including the top four that were not in the RC1 version:

All-NVME Platform support includes enhanced manageability and performance. This improves the TrueNAS R30, a new 1U all-NVMe platform with 30GB/s bandwidth and 240TB. Bluefin

Gluster Node replacement is enabled via APIs which reduce downtime and risk when replacing a node in a cluster.

HA system acceleration is provided via improved NVDIMM (SLOG) handling on the TrueNAS M-Series.

Root-less Security provides restricted administration privileges to non-root users. This is important to FIPS-140 security and adds to the array of ransomware prevention techniques.

SMB Share Proxy provides a redirect mechanism for making many TrueNAS SMB Shares available in a common namespace presented by one TrueNAS system. (Available in 22.12.1)

Storage WebUI delivers some massive improvements in pool, device, and dataset management, and provides more comprehensive information on single web pages.

Kubernetes CSI Driver for Clusters – External Kubernetes clusters can use TrueNAS SCALE as the storage cluster. TrueNAS SCALE can support Kubernetes CSI, VMware ESXi, and OpenStack Cinder, as well as provide file and object storage services.

Docker OverlayFS – OverlayFS support within OpenZFS enables greatly reduced overhead when running Container workloads.

Virtualization Improvements – USB device pass-through and CPU pinning are enabled, in addition to the existing pass-through of any PCIe devices, including GPUs.

Apps GPU Acceleration – A newer generation of GPUs are now supported for sharing with Application workloads. This includes Alderlake integrated GPUs and up through GeForce-30XX Nvidia GPUs.

Wireguard VPN Access – Wireguard App will enable straightforward remote access to a system and its Apps. Play or work from home or office.

iX-Storj service – Globally Distributed Storage with Web3.0 technology is a game-changer for cloud storage reliability, costs, and performance.

Storage performance improvements – TrueNAS SCALE has now had 6 months of performance testing and bug fixes. Improvements in encryption, NFS, and iSCSI performance are most notable.

Enterprise Support – Maturing of HA support will enable Enterprise deployments of SCALE. In particular, Bluefin will also allow IPv6-only deployments. Additionally, major work has been included which allows a TrueNAS SCALE system to support more than several hundred physical disks connected to a single system.

Security Enhancements – API keys can enable fine-grained, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and restrict root privileges. CLI-Driven “Root-less” restricted administration accounts can be enabled and used to further improve Ransomware protection. FIPS 140-3 compliant crypto modules (Enterprise Only) will allow use in high-security use cases.

Joining the School of Bluefin

Bluefin is an easy upgrade from SCALE Angelfish and is recommended for testers and early adopters. For more conservative users, the software status of TrueNAS editions is tracked here. There is an enormous list of Bluefin changes available in the release notes, which includes over 1,000 improvements and fixes.

We want to thank the community for the tremendous support in improving TrueNAS SCALE quality. It’s been an exciting ride and there’s much more to come, so please keep making suggestions and reporting bugs as we continue to improve the quality of TrueNAS SCALE together. Want to learn more about TrueNAS SCALE business solutions? Contact us to speak to a product specialist.

The post TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin is RELEASED into the Wild appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Angelfish (22.02.4) is feature-complete and the next update is Bluefin which includes bug fixes, improvements, and new features. Testers and Early Adopters can try out (and roll back) Bluefin if looking for the next level of TrueNAS. Release Candidate implies that BETA testing and lab testing have gone well with no major issues and there is little risk to user data. However, early adopters should expect and report bugs that can be resolved in later versions. We always welcome testing and feedback.

What’s New in Bluefin?

Diving deeper, Bluefin inherits all the functional capabilities of Angelfish and also includes hundreds of bug fixes and new features, including the following:

• Storage WebUI delivers some massive improvements in pool, device, and dataset management, and provides more comprehensive information on single web pages. 

• Kubernetes CSI Driver for Clusters – External Kubernetes clusters can use TrueNAS SCALE as the storage cluster. TrueNAS SCALE can support Kubernetes CSI, VMware ESXi, and OpenStack Cinder, as well as provide file and object storage services.
• Docker OverlayFS  – OverlayFS support within OpenZFS enables greatly reduced overhead when running Container workloads.  
• Virtualization Improvements – The range of GPUs that can be passed through now includes Alderlake integrated GPUs and GeForce-30 Nvidia GPUs for VMs and Containers. USB device pass-through and CPU pinning are enabled.
• Wireguard VPN Access – Wireguard App will enable straightforward remote access to a system and its Apps. Play or work from home or office.
• iX-Storj service  – Globally Distributed Storage with Web3.0 techniques is a game-changer for cloud storage reliability, costs, and performance.
• Storage performance improvements – TrueNAS SCALE has now had 6 months of performance testing and bug fixes. Improvements in encryption, NFS, and iSCSI performance are most notable. 
• Enterprise Support – Maturing of HA support will enable Enterprise deployments of SCALE. In particular, Bluefin will also allow IPv6-only deployments. Additionally, major work has been included which allows a TrueNAS SCALE system to support more than several hundred physical disks connected to a single system.
• Cluster Feature Improvements – Additional functionality for cluster lifecycle management includes better visibility into clusters as well as UI driven tools for repairing faulted clusters or replacing individual nodes. A later version of Bluefin will also include Gluster snapshots – executed via ZFS snapshots. These capabilities will be made visible in a future version of TrueCommand.
• Security Enhancements – API keys can enable fine-grained, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and restrict root privileges. CLI-Driven “Root-less” restricted administration accounts can be enabled and be used to further improve Ransomware protection. FIPS 140-3 compliant crypto modules will allow use in high security use-cases.

Joining the School of Bluefin

Bluefin will be an easy upgrade from SCALE Angelfish when it is released. The Bluefin RC1 release is now available and recommended for testers and early adopters. The software status of TrueNAS editions is tracked here.

We appreciate all the feature requests, development contributions, and testing that has already gone into Bluefin. There is an enormous list of Bluefin changes available in the release notes, which includes over 1,000 improvements and fixes.  

We want to thank the community for the tremendous support in improving TrueNAS SCALE quality! It’s been an exciting ride and there’s much more to come, so please keep making suggestions and reporting bugs as we continue to improve the quality of TrueNAS SCALE together. 

The post TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin has a Release Candidate appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Docker (and Kubernetes) uses an Overlay file system to manage the layers of pre-built container distribution images. Overlay file systems allow for creating a union mapping of two or more directories: a list of lower directories and an upper directory. The lower directories of the filesystem are read only, whereas the upper directory can be used for both reads and writes.

Until now, OpenZFS has not natively supported these Overlay filesystem primitives, and the result has been some major inefficiencies in how Linux Containers have scaled up. Last year, it became a high priority for iX to solve this limitation for future releases of SCALE. Recently, the new OverlayFS capability has passed its initial battery of testing and has landed in the RC1 release of SCALE 22.12 (Bluefin).

With this OverlayFS addition, OpenZFS becomes a superior file system for managing container storage. Not only is OverlayFS supported, but all the significant advantages of OpenZFS over other Linux file systems are inherited. The benefits inherited by TrueNAS SCALE include:

• Copy-on-Write snapshots and clones
• Integrated volume management with multiple RAID levels
• In-line compression, encryption, and deduplication
• Efficient, encrypted replication
• Effective Read and Write Caching
• On-line expansion and self-healing

TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin (22.12-RC.1) includes these major improvements to OpenZFS and is scheduled for November 15th. TrueNAS SCALE’s Application Infrastructure will automatically switch to using the OverlayFS container drivers and users should see an immediate improvement to CPU utilization and a minimization of on-disk dataset & snapshot utilization. Developers and testers can test using the latest nightly. TrueNAS SCALE users can expect to see a Bluefin RELEASE version at the end of 2022.

TrueNAS SCALE users will see much simpler operation of Docker Containers and Apps (Helm Charts). Both the built-in Apps and other community-run App Catalogs will benefit. System admins will see both improved performance and much less clutter when administering snapshots.

The OpenZFS software for this improvement has been contributed back to the OpenZFS community with the expectation it may become a standard capability of future OpenZFS releases as well as TrueNAS SCALE. The GitHub link for the OpenZFS-OverlayFS feature is here.

For more discussion on containers, check out our Community Forums and Discord Channel where you can post and collaborate. We also welcome any questions on TrueNAS appliances on our contact form or live chat on our websites.

The post iX Collaborates to add native OverlayFS Support to OpenZFS for Docker & Kubernetes 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.

NextCloud is a drop-in replacement for many popular cloud services, including file-sharing, calendar, groupware, and more. In addition to this, it is commonly used in the home environment as a media backup, organizing and sharing service.  NextCloud can be deployed as an App on TrueNAS SCALE or as a plugin on TrueNAS CORE.

We’ve been hard at work with the Nextcloud team producing resources to help guide you through the setup and configuration process, including how to use Nextcloud with TrueNAS SCALE. Below, you’ll find useful links to all of the TrueNAS Community and iXsystems resources currently available regarding TrueNAS and Nextcloud.

Most recently, we created a how-to guide for adding media previews to a NextCloud App on TrueNAS SCALE. Media previews make it much easier to navigate and search content within Nextcloud folders. Below is a screenshot with those previews activated.

Documentation:

• Nextcloud Plugin
• Installing Nextcloud on SCALE
• Adding Nextcloud for Media Previews

Forum:

• Forum Tag: Nextcloud

Blog:

• Nextcloud and TrueNAS deliver Productivity and Privacy 
• Nextcloud and TrueNAS Collaborate to Help You Build Your Private Cloud

There is also an App for Collabora which is installed separately from NextCloud. After installing both of these Apps, they can be logically connected giving users the ability to jointly edit documents, much like Google Docs. This functionality has been confirmed to work but needs Community testing to find any bugs or rough edges. We look forward to your feedback.

The post Resources for Using Nextcloud on TrueNAS SCALE appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Software quality continues to increase with this 5th release of TrueNAS SCALE 22.02 Angelfish. The success of Angelfish has led to 5X growth so far in 2022 and a major increase in Linux users of TrueNAS. TrueNAS SCALE 22.02.3 was deemed to be of suitable quality for General use (see TrueNAS Software Status page) and will be surpassed by SCALE 22.02.4 with its many improvements.

Bluefin is the next major version of TrueNAS SCALE. TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin BETA is also now available to those interested in helping test and contribute to the development process. It includes all the Angelfish capabilities plus many new features. It is a simple upgrade but is only recommended for developers and testers at this stage. December is the target for RELEASE candidate status. All new features and bug fixes for Angelfish will go into Bluefin from here forward.

The Changes in TrueNAS SCALE 22.02.4

The details of TrueNAS SCALE 22.02.4 can be found in the release notes. There are over 130 new bug fixes and improvements that will provide another significant quality jump from the previous version. Notable inclusions consist of:

• iX-Storj Globally Distributed Storage
• M-Series HA with NVDIMM support
• SMB Clustering improvements
• Better error handling with service starts after slow pool import

We want to thank the community for the tremendous support in improving TrueNAS SCALE Angelfish quality! It’s been an exciting first version, and there’s so much more to come with TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin. For those with a test system, please try out Bluefin, report bugs, and make suggestions as we improve TrueNAS SCALE together.

The feature set for TrueNAS SCALE 22.02 is described in the TrueNAS SCALE datasheet, and the TrueNAS SCALE documentation provides a starting point to build and run your first systems. If you need to dig deeper or need advice, the TrueNAS Community forums provide a great source of information and community collaboration.

Who Should Use TrueNAS SCALE?

TrueNAS SCALE is particularly well suited for users with requirements for Linux Apps/containers and/or running Linux VMs, in addition to standard storage needs. At this U4 stage of its Software Development Lifecycle, TrueNAS SCALE is suitable for general deployments and tech labs. Users with scale-out storage requirements can test and deploy for their specific use-cases or interests.

For Linux developers, there are many opportunities to contribute to the Open Source TrueNAS SCALE project, and we have a vibrant Discord Community for contributors. It is a well-coordinated and managed environment to collaborate in developing the best open hyperconverged infrastructure as a collective.

“Bluefin” is the next major release after SCALE 22.02. It will include some major enhancements such as support for enhanced Cluster Operations, optional FIPS 140-3 crypto library support, and security improvements including rootless administration.

Enterprise Production Use

For commercial users with scale-out needs, iXsystems supports the testing of specific TrueNAS SCALE deployments and applications before they enter the production phase. Please contact your iXsystems Account Representative or email us at info@iXsystems.com if you are interested in using TrueNAS SCALE for production.

Conservative users with standard storage-specific NAS requirements (NFS, SMB, iSCSI, S3) are still advised to use TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise, which have eight times more data under management and over ten years of operation and stability. TrueNAS SCALE has inherited some of that maturity and automated testing, but is not yet as mature. Currently, TrueNAS 13.0-U2 (CORE & Enterprise) is the most robust scale-up storage platform for general use. We expect it to be recommended for mission critical use on TrueNAS Enterprise appliances in the coming weeks, in place of TrueNAS 12.0-U8.1.

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

The post TrueNAS SCALE Angelfish enables iX-Storj Service 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.

Bluefin is the new release train for major TrueNAS SCALE feature improvements. It is expected to reach the RELEASE stage at the end of 2022. 

Angelfish delivered the primary benefits of SCALE to the large open source community. In addition, it provided a powerful new Application Charting System using Helm and K3s, which has enabled many third-party App providers to offer large collections of ready-made applications for deployment. Angelfish also included the tools to migrate smoothly from TrueNAS CORE.

Bluefin inherits all the functional capabilities of Angelfish and will also include WebUI updates to simplify operations of TrueNAS SCALE systems. In particular, there will be some massive improvements in pool, device, and dataset management that will provide more comprehensive information on single web pages. Examples and feedback can be provided via Github.

Bluefin adds many new capabilities

It is truly thrilling to see all the Open Source options available to enhance TrueNAS SCALE with its Linux base. We expect the innovation within TrueNAS SCALE and its associated software to accelerate in the coming years. For Bluefin, there is a limit to what we can promise at this stage, but rest assured, there is more on the way!

The primary additions to Bluefin are described below:

• Scale-Up Performance Improvements – Bluefin has gone through additional tuning and optimization to ensure that performance can meet the needs of the most demanding applications. Additionally, major work has been completed to allow a TrueNAS SCALE system to support > 1K physical disks connected to a single system.
• Cluster Feature Improvements – The clustering features of TrueNAS SCALE have been improved to include additional functionality for cluster lifecycle management. This includes better visibility into clusters as well as UI driven tools for repairing faulted clusters or replacing individual nodes. 
• Active-Active reliability for storage – Preliminary clustering via gluster (file) and Minio (S3 object) will be hardened with more focus on non-disruptive cluster expansion and software updates. This will simplify the DevOps task of building a reliable storage infrastructure. 
• Linux-based  Security Enhancements – While TrueNAS has an extremely long list of security capabilities, there are always more to be provided. With Bluefin, API keys can enable fine-grained, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and restrict root privileges. Options to enable CLI-Driven “Root-less” restricted administration accounts are also scheduled for subsequent beta and RC releases. FIPS 140-3 compliant crypto modules simplifies use in high-security use-cases.
• Enterprise Support – TrueNAS SCALE is already available for deployment on TrueNAS appliances with enterprise support. Enterprise support for software-only deployments will enable supported operation on existing server farms with qualified hardware. This 2023 initiative will also be the foundational step needed to help organizations build Hybrid cloud solutions.

And, what a coincidence, these new capabilities spell “SCALE” again!  (Ok, maybe not entirely a coincidence 😉)

Another major capability being enabled for TrueNAS is “Globally Distributed Storage”, where TrueNAS can act as both a client of Web3 decentralized storage and participate as a storage node. We think this direction will enable us to deliver much faster, more cost-effective, and easier backup or archive options for TrueNAS. 

Bluefin also includes much broader GPU support with updates to drivers for Alderlake iGPUs (Intel) and more recent Nvidia GeForce 30-series GPUs. These GPUs can be used in “passthrough” mode by Apps for offload processing, and by VMs for processing or high-resolution displays.

Bluefin will be an easy upgrade from SCALE Angelfish when it is released. The Bluefin BETA release is now available and recommended for developers and testers. The software status of TrueNAS editions is tracked here.

Contributing to Development and Testing

We appreciate all the feature requests, development contributions, and testing that has already gone into Bluefin. There is an enormous list of Bluefin changes available in the release notes, which includes over 700 improvements and fixes.  

More features can still be added and we give priority to customers, active community users, and contributors. If you need something specific for your use case, please search for an existing ticket, vote for it, or make a new suggestion and explain the benefits you expect from the feature.  

There will always be features that won’t make the cut that may go into the next release, which will be called “Cobia”. That work is expected to start during Q4 2022 with delivery in 2023.

We want to thank the community for the tremendous support in improving TrueNAS SCALE quality! It’s been an exciting ride and there’s much more to come, so please keep making suggestions and reporting bugs as we continue to improve the quality of TrueNAS SCALE together.

The post TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin Reaches BETA appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

The post TrueNAS SCALE gets Quality Improvements with 3rd Major Update appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

The post TrueNAS SCALE adds SMB Clustering in 2nd Major Update appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

TrueNAS SCALE 22.02.0 (“Angelfish”) was released on “Twosday”, 2/22/22 and now gets its first major update after being deployed on over 16,000 active systems. TrueNAS SCALE 22.02.1 includes over 270 bug fixes and improvements and is a major step on the path to quality and reliability.

The growth of TrueNAS SCALE is extraordinary with over 100% system count growth per quarter since the start of the BETA process. We are excited to see widespread adoption by experienced Linux admins and look forward to working with more Linux admins and users.

The amount of storage under management by TrueNAS SCALE is also growing rapidly and is on track to pass an ExaByte this year. The enormity of the data stored requires extremely high software quality and excellent data management. Each software update takes this reliability another step forward as described in the quality lifecycle.

TrueNAS SCALE is still TrueNAS…with differences

TrueNAS SCALE is the culmination of an almost three-year collaborative effort from the iXsystems engineering team and the TrueNAS Community. The journey started with iXsystems contributions in promoting the combination of both Linux and FreeBSD as the primary operating systems for OpenZFS 2.0. This allowed the TrueNAS middleware to be ported between both OSes, with the goal of eventually supporting existing TrueNAS features atop a Linux base to unlock several Linux-specific capabilities.

The major additions to TrueNAS SCALE are:

• Kubernetes Apps enable Linux/Docker Containers
• • Vast library of dockerized applications and Apps Catalogs
  • Supports Helm charts and now Docker Compose apps
• TrueNAS CLI provides robust interface via REST API to middleware
• KVM provides robust and feature-rich hypervisor with good Windows guest support
• Updated WebUI provides a greatly improved NAS management experience
• Scale-out ZFS enabled via Glusterfs
• • Allows scale-out capacity and bandwidth via native client or SMB
  • Supports mirroring and dispersed (erasure code) volumes
• Scale-out SMB clustering
• • Leverages Glusterfs and provides increased capacity/bandwidth
• High Availability also applies to Apps and VMs
• Scale-out S3 is supported via the Minio App
• • Migration via CloudSync or Minio replication.

Migrating from TrueNAS CORE is possible

TrueNAS CORE 12.0-U8 is a very mature software release with all the benefits of millions of machine years of testing and bug fixes since it started life as FreeNAS. Migrating from CORE to SCALE is possible, but only recommended to users that see significant benefits from the unique TrueNAS SCALE features.
The migration path from TrueNAS CORE to SCALE is now better tested and is improved with this first update. Below is a summary of the pot-holes to avoid along the way:

• Jails & Plugins cannot be migrated to Kubernetes Apps.
• • Each application must be recreated or reinstalled on SCALE.
  • Plugins and datasets can be migrated to App with the same application software
• Netcli functionality is replaced by TrueNAS cli. (see docs – more to come)
• Bhyve removed – VMs auto-migrate to KVM with same zvol
• AFP Shares are retired
• • Migrate to an SMB share with AFP compatibility enabled.
• wheel group exists in CORE, not in SCALE
• • This impacts permissions settings and can prevent shares from functioning. Change any permissions set to the wheel group before migrating.
• Multipath is not supported
• • Turn off multipathing within CORE/Enterprise before migrating.
• GELI encryption is not supported and there is no migration
• • File level backup/restore is required.
  • Unlock the pool then use ZFS/rsync replication to replicate the data to a new pool.
• iSCSI ALUA & Fibre Channel are not supported until TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin
• Asigra plugin is currently not supported (support coming in a future release)
• TrueNAS (Enterprise) High Availability is demonstrable, but not yet mature. Users are advised to wait until Update 3 or 4.

Linux was also missing a driver for SATA backplanes and this has delayed the delivery of enclosure management for Minis and R-series. This should be resolved soon.

The changes in TrueNAS SCALE 22.02.1

The feature set for TrueNAS SCALE 22.02.1 is described in the TrueNAS SCALE datasheet, and the TrueNAS SCALE documentation provides most of what you need to know to build and run your first systems. If you are missing some information or need advice, the TrueNAS Community forums provide a great source of information and community.

The details of TrueNAS SCALE 22.02.1 are in the release notes. There are over 270 new bug fixes and improvements that will provide a significant quality jump from the RELEASE version. Notable inclusions are:

• The much loved Netdata App
• Increased kernel NFS robustness and performance
• Self-encrypting Drive support
• Improved pool management UI
• Better UPS support
• Improved Gluster and Clustered SMB APIs

TrueCommand 2.2 will be using the SMB cluster APIs to make clustering simpler to deploy and use. This release is planned for May.

We want to thank the community for the tremendous support in improving TrueNAS SCALE quality! It’s been an exciting ride, and there’s much more to come, so please keep reporting bugs and making suggestions as we continue to improve the quality of TrueNAS SCALE together.

The Netdata App and its UI

Who Should Use TrueNAS SCALE?

At this U1 stage of its Software Development Lifecycle, TrueNAS SCALE is primarily for sub-PetaByte projects and tech labs. It is particularly well suited to users with Linux Apps and Virtualization requirements in addition to standard storage needs. Users with scale-out storage requirements can start testing for their specific use-cases or interests.

For Linux developers, there are many opportunities to contribute to the Open Source TrueNAS SCALE project, and we have a vibrant Discord Community for contributors. It is a well-coordinated and managed environment to collaborate in developing the best open hyperconverged infrastructure as a collective.

“Bluefin” is the next major release after SCALE 22.02. It will include some major enhancements including scale-out ZFS snapshots and replication, clustered Kubernetes, and clustered hypervisors. For more information, see this community post.

Enterprise Production Use

For larger commercial users with scale-out needs, iXsystems has a trial support program to support specific deployments and applications before they complete testing and enter the production phase. Please contact your iXsystems Account Representative, or email us at info@iXsystems.com if you are interested in trialing TrueNAS SCALE.

Production users with standard NAS (NFS, SMB, iSCSI, S3) requirements are still advised to use TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise, which have a hundred times more data under management and over ten years of operation and stability. TrueNAS SCALE has inherited some of that maturity and the automated testing but has not yet completed its enterprise software quality lifecycle. In parallel, TrueNAS CORE 13.0 has also started its journey and is now at the RC1 phase.

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

The post TrueNAS SCALE 22.02.1 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.

iXsystems is excited and delighted to welcome Linux users to join the TrueNAS Community. All of the excellent TrueNAS tools like OpenZFS, Snapshots, Replication, REST APIs, WebUI, Samba with Windows ACLs, High Availability, Enclosure Management, and Single-click software updates are now joined by the standard Linux toolchain and a familiar Debian Linux system environment. We invite all Linux admins, users, and enthusiasts to try it for themselves and come join the TrueNAS Community.

TrueNAS SCALE is still TrueNAS…plus MAJOR additions

TrueNAS SCALE is the culmination of an almost three-year collaborative effort from the iXsystems engineering team and the TrueNAS Community.  The journey started with iXsystems contributions in promoting the combination of both Linux and FreeBSD as the primary OSes for OpenZFS 2.0. This allowed the TrueNAS middleware to be ported between both OS’s, with the goal of eventually supporting existing TrueNAS features atop a Linux base to unlock several Linux-specific capabilities, including Docker Containers, Kubernetes, KVM, and also Scale-out ZFS through the gluster file system. 

TrueNAS SCALE’s set of additional features and capabilities enable TrueNAS to provide Open Source Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) and Scale-out Unified Storage. Through the use of Linux, TrueNAS SCALE can live up to its acronym:

The TrueNAS SCALE path to Release

The path from development to ALPHA, then BETA, RC, and now RELEASE has taken 18 months of development and an extensive testing effort. Over 10,000 TrueNAS Community users have participated and tested on their widely varying hardware platforms and VMs. A successful three month RELEASE CANDIDATE (RC) stage with its two QA cycles completed the path to RELEASE. The lifecycle of TrueNAS SCALE, including the growth to 10,000 users is outlined below.

The RELEASE stage is the major milestone in our software lifecycle which enables customers to start building and deploying systems for business use. At RELEASE, iXsystems offers standard Enterprise support contracts. We look forward to working with our partners and customers over the coming months.

iXsystems is contributing significantly to Linux

While many applications port easily from FreeBSD to Linux, TrueNAS leverages many OS tools to provide an appliance-like experience. Adding a new OS, integrating it effectively, and then making sure it is rock solid and reliable is no small feat. The iXsystems engineering team and the many TrueNAS Community contributors and testers have collectively spent hundreds of development years making this release possible. Sincerest thanks to all who collaborated with us on this incredible journey!

Highlights of the many iXsystems technical contributions to TrueNAS SCALE include:

OpenZFS 2.0: The inclusion of FreeBSD and Linux as a thoroughly tested peer in OpenZFS enabled the migration of data between TrueNAS CORE to TrueNAS SCALE. Both the development and testing processes were contributed by iXsystems. After completing the OpenZFS 2.0 integration, iXsystems has contributed many scalability improvements, including a major reduction of pool import times in large systems.

Windows ACLs on Linux: By default, Linux only supports POSIX.1e ACLs which are a small subset of Windows (NFSv4) ACLs.  The iXsystems addition of NFSv4 ACLs on OpenZFS within Linux enables much better SMB sharing compatibility with Windows.

Scale-out OpenZFS: iXsystems is integrating the Gluster File System and OpenZFS to create a system with the properties of scale-out ZFS. Recent contributions include the ability to tie Gluster and OpenZFS snapshots together, which will appear in the next release, known as “Bluefin”.

Kubernetes Apps: iXsystems migrated the Apps capability from FreeBSD Jails/Plugins to a Kubernetes infrastructure with Helm Charts and support for Docker Containers and pods. Partners such as TrueCharts.org have further enabled large catalogs of applications to be available to the user community.

CLI and GUI Usability: TrueNAS SCALE included a more efficient WebUI that lets users configure and view more settings on a single web page. The Command-Line Interface (CLI) has been enhanced with a TrueNAS CLI that lets users harness all the power of the TrueNAS REST APIs from a text console.

The changes in TrueNAS SCALE 22.02.0

The feature set for TrueNAS 22.02 is described in the TrueNAS SCALE datasheet, and the TrueNAS SCALE documentation provides most of what you need to know to build and run your first systems. If you are missing some information or need advice, the TrueNAS Community forums provide a great source of information and community.

The details of TrueNAS SCALE 22.02.0 are in the release notes. There are over 300 new bug fixes and improvements that will provide a significant quality jump from the RC2 version. Notable inclusions are:

• Better integration with third-party app repositories, such as TrueCharts. 
• Ability to ‘sidegrade” from TrueNAS CORE to SCALE
• Full NFSv4 ACL support on both NFS and SMB protocols
• M-Series Enclosure Management
• High Availability (dual-controller) initial support
• Customizable Dashboard page
  

We want to thank the community for the tremendous support in bringing TrueNAS SCALE to life! The assistance in finding and resolving bugs has been invaluable. It’s been quite an exciting ride, and there’s much more to come, so please keep reporting bugs and making suggestions as we continue to improve the quality of TrueNAS SCALE together. 

Who Should Use TrueNAS SCALE?

At this RELEASE stage of its Software Development Lifecycle, TrueNAS SCALE is primarily for home usage, smaller projects, and tech labs. It is particularly well suited to users with Linux Apps and Virtualization requirements in addition to standard storage needs. Users with scale-out storage requirements can start testing for their specific use-cases or interests.

For Linux developers, there are many opportunities to contribute to the Open Source TrueNAS SCALE project, and we have a vibrant Discord Community for contributors.  It is a well-coordinated and managed environment to collaborate in developing the best open hyperconverged infrastructure as a collective. Bluefin is the next major release after SCALE 22.02. It will include some major enhancements including scale-out ZFS snapshots and replication, clustered Kubernetes, and clustered hypervisors. For more information, see this community post.  

For larger commercial users with scale-out needs, iXsystems has a trial support program to support specific deployments and applications before they complete testing and enter the production phase. Please contact your iXsystems Account Representative, or email us at info@iXsystems.com if you are interested in trialing TrueNAS SCALE. 

Production users with standard NAS (NFS, SMB, iSCSI, S3) requirements are still advised to use TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise, which have a hundred times more data under management and over ten years of operation and stability. TrueNAS SCALE has inherited some of that maturity and the automated testing but has not yet completed its enterprise software quality lifecycle. In parallel, TrueNAS CORE 13.0 has also started its journey with a BETA release.

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

The post First Official RELEASE of TrueNAS on Linux! appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

The TrueNAS SCALE datasheet has been updated with its planned Angelfish feature set. As TrueNAS SCALE “Angelfish” matures and its release date is set for February 2022, it transitions to its more formal and official name, SCALE 22.02. The RC1 version (22.02-RC1) had well over 6,000 daily users and received excellent feedback and bug reports. Many thanks go out to the TrueNAS community for helping SCALE in this next step on its sleigh ride to full release quality. 

TrueNAS SCALE 22.02-RC2 includes a few new Christmas surprises:

• Better Gluster cluster integration with TrueCommand 2.1
• Final set of UX Changes to help make SCALE the best TrueNAS experience ever
• Updated Hardware support with Linux Kernel 5.10.81
• Better App integration and support for third-party repos, including TrueCharts

More importantly, this RC2 version includes over 200 bug fixes from RC1 and is now approaching the release quality everyone wants from their Christmas presents. Over the next two months, there will be more bug fixes as well as more extensive performance and integration testing. Linux-based TrueNAS SCALE has some different characteristics to the FreeBSD-based TrueNAS CORE.

The naming and timing of the Angelfish releases are shown in the following table.

TrueNAS SCALE Angelfish Releases
Release Number	Planned Date	Notes
SCALE 21.08-BETA.2	10/8/21	Last BETA version
SCALE 22.2-RC1	10/26/21	First Release Candidate
SCALE 22.2-RC2	12/21/21	Final release Candidate
SCALE 22.2.0	February 2022	Planned General Availability
SCALE 22.2.1	April 2022	First Update

We want to thank the community for the tremendous support in bringing TrueNAS SCALE to life. The assistance in finding and resolving bugs has been invaluable. It has also been awesome to collaborate with many developers who have contributed major enhancements. Please keep reporting bugs and making suggestions as we finish this initial GA release together as a community!

“Bluefin” has started its Journey

Bluefin is the next major release after Angelfish. It will include some major enhancements including scale-out ZFS snapshots and replication, clustered Kubernetes, and clustered hypervisors.

Bluefin nightly images will start publishing in early 2022, and we will finalize the list of major features around the same time. Bluefin will remain as nightlies until it reaches BETA. At that point, we will give it an official version name and a target GA date in 2022. You’ll see information in jira.ixsytems.com and can expect us to blog about it more in early 2022. 

Who Should Use TrueNAS SCALE?

At this RC2 stage of its Software Development Lifecycle, TrueNAS SCALE is primarily for developers, testers, tech-savvy enthusiasts, and early adopters. For Linux developers, there are many opportunities to contribute to the Open Source TrueNAS SCALE project, and we have a vibrant Discord Community for contributors. It is a well-coordinated and managed environment to collaborate in developing the best open hyper-converged infrastructure as a collective. For more information, see this community post.

For larger commercial users with scale-out needs, iXsystems has a formal BETA program to support specific deployments and applications before they complete testing and enter the production phase. TrueNAS SCALE can be supported on TrueNAS M-Series, R-Series, and Mini platforms. Please contact your iXsystems Account Representative, or email us at info@iXsystems.com if you are interested in joining the BETA program. 

Production users with standard NAS (NFS, SMB, iSCSI, S3) requirements are still advised to use TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise, which have a hundred times more data under management and over ten years of operation and stability. TrueNAS SCALE has inherited some of that maturity and the automated testing but has not completed its software quality lifecycle.

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 SCALE 22.02-RC2 is ready for Santa appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

Users and third parties can now build catalogs of application charts for deployment with the ease of an app store experience. These catalogs are like app stores for TrueNAS SCALE.  iXsystems has been collaborating and sponsoring the team developing TrueCharts, the first and most comprehensive of these app stores. Best of all, the TrueCharts Apps are free and Open Source.

TrueCharts delivers over 180 easily-deployed and diverse applications to the TrueNAS community and so we’ve invited the TrueCharts team to write a guest blog. 

TrueCharts Guest Blog

With streamlined Kubernetes support for its ”apps”, TrueNAS SCALE makes the big step of bringing Kubernetes to the masses while staying true to its Open Source philosophy by allowing the community to build their own apps and catalogs. This ability for users to pick their own favorite catalogs for apps has already paid off. Meet TrueCharts, the first community app catalog!

TrueCharts catalog already supports over 180 Apps

TrueCharts was built by the founders of a group for installation scripts for TrueNAS CORE, called “Jailman”. TrueCharts aims to be more than what Jailman was capable of: a user-friendly installer, offering all the flexibility the average user needs and deserves!

Working as a completely independent project, the TrueCharts community has since spent a whole year carefully crafting tools to add many of the awesome features that Kubernetes has to offer to the TrueNAS SCALE apps ecosystem. For example, all apps can be simply enabled with Traefik reverse proxy and Wireguard VPN capabilities. In addition to the official apps like Plex, Nextcloud, and Minio, TrueCharts adds a huge variety of apps including Vaultwarden, Handbrake, OpenLDAP, Photoprism, Pihole, and Syncthing.

The main goal for TrueCharts is to give a solid framework for users who are new to Kubernetes, while also exposing as many Kubernetes features as possible for experienced users. Where the official apps by iXsystems focus on easy deployment, TrueCharts focuses on those applications that need a bit more flexibility to customize the app for a specific use case and system. This can all be done from within the TrueNAS SCALE UI, simply by adding the catalog and following our Quick Start guides!

TrueCharts enables each App to be easily customized

As the release of TrueNAS SCALE 22.02 “AngelFish” is getting closer and closer, the TrueCharts Team and iXsystems are already hard at work looking into a future of fully high-available apps, dynamic scaling, and distributed storage. Want to know more about TrueCharts? Visit TrueCharts.org or come visit our great community: TrueCharts on Discord!

TrueCharts and TrueNAS = Endless Possibilities

The post Meet TrueCharts – the First App Catalog for TrueNAS SCALE 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!

The post OpenZFS 3.0 Introduced at Developer Summit appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

The naming system for TrueNAS SCALE is being improved to simplify things for developers and operational users.  Each version will have both a codename (e.g Angelfish, Bluefin….Carp? Cherubfish? We’re open to suggestions from the community for the next version after Bluefin)  and an official version name (e.g SCALE 22.02)  prior to release.  The official version name will reflect the planned general availability (GA) date where users can expect to be able to get Enterprise support and the code quality is sufficiently high. The following table shows the high-level TrueNAS SCALE version plan.

SCALE Version	Current	Next	Future
Icon
Codename	Angelfish	Bluefin	Carp?
Status	RC1 (Oct 26)	Nightly (soon)	Planned
Official name	22.02	22.TBD	23.TBD
Release Target	Feb 2022	Late 2022	2023
Key Features	Kubernetes/Apps	Clustered Kubernetes	TBD
	KVM Hypervisor	High Availability VMs
	Scale-out ZFS	Scale-out Snapshots
	Clustered SMB	Many others.

The Angelfish version will be officially called “SCALE 22.02”, since Feb 2022 is the (GA) target. Angelfish is largely defined by the feature set in SCALE 21.08. The naming of future Angelfish releases will be changed as shown in the following table.

TrueNAS SCALE Angelfish Releases
Release Number	Planned Date	Notes
SCALE 21.08-BETA.2	10/8/21	Available and recommended
SCALE 22.02-RC1	10/26/21	In the final QA process
SCALE 22.02-RC2	December 2021	In development – includes M-Series HA
SCALE 22.02.0	February 2022	Planned General Availability
SCALE 22.02.1	April 2022	First Update

The October RC1 release is being renamed SCALE 22.02-RC1 because this is the official branch point between Angelfish and Bluefin. From this point, new software improvements and features would arrive in the Bluefin version.  There will be publicly available Bluefin nightly releases (aka “nightlies”) for the development community and active testers to help collaborate on this next major release of TrueNAS SCALE.  In some cases, bug fixes provided to Bluefin will be tested and then backported to Angelfish. This naming convention avoids any problems if both Angelfish and Bluefin have releases in the same month.

TrueNAS SCALE Angelfish completes the primary goals of TrueNAS SCALE (SCALE as an acronym equals Scale-out, Convergence, Active-active, Linux, Easy) for many, but not all, use cases. The SCALE Bluefin version will take this to the next level and add many new features, including Kubernetes clustering and scale-out ZFS snapshots/replication.

Bluefin nightlies will start before the end of the year, and we will finalize the list of major features early in 2022.  Bluefin will stay as nightlies until it reaches BETA. At that point, we will give it an official version name and a target GA date. You’ll see information in jira.ixsytems.com and can expect us to blog about it more in early 2022. 

The good news is that none of these changes impact the schedule. TrueNAS SCALE 22.02-RC1 was frozen a week ago and is halfway through its QA cycle. It’s looking good for its release on October 26. The quality is another major step from SCALE 21.08 which now has almost 4,000 users, the most of any previous TrueNAS or FreeNAS BETA release.

We want to thank the community for the tremendous support in bringing TrueNAS SCALE to life.  The assistance in finding and resolving bugs has been invaluable. It’s also been awesome to collaborate with many developers who have contributed major enhancements.  Please keep reporting bugs and making suggestions as we finish this initial GA release together! 

Who Should Use TrueNAS SCALE?

At this BETA and RC stage of its Software Development Lifecycle, TrueNAS SCALE is primarily for developers, testers, tech-savvy enthusiasts, and early adopters. For Linux developers, there are many opportunities to contribute to the Open Source TrueNAS SCALE project, and we have a vibrant Discord Community for contributors.  It is a well-coordinated and managed environment to collaborate in developing the best open hyperconverged infrastructure as a collective. For more information, see this community post.

For larger commercial users with scale-out needs, iXsystems has a formal BETA program to support specific deployments and applications before they complete testing and enter the production phase. Please contact your iXsystems Account Representative or email us at info@iXsystems.com if you are interested in joining the BETA program. 

Production users with standard NAS (NFS, SMB, iSCSI, S3) requirements are still advised to use TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise, which have a hundred times more data under management and over ten years of operation and stability. TrueNAS SCALE has inherited some of that maturity and the automated testing but has not completed its software quality lifecycle.  

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 SCALE Release Schedule Explained appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

The post TrueNAS SCALE 21.08 Delivers Major SMB Enhancements 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.

Background on TrueNAS SCALE

TrueNAS SCALE is Open Source HCI. As our initial community post and blog indicated, TrueNAS SCALE is defined by its acronym:

TrueNAS SCALE started from the TrueNAS CORE 12.0 base which includes OpenZFS 2.0, all the file, block, and object storage services, the middleware to coordinate these, and the web UI to present a user-oriented view of the system. This base has been tested by hundreds of thousands of users over the last few years and is very similar to the TrueNAS CORE 12.0-U2 release that is already widely deployed. The major new capabilities are based on Debian Linux and these define the new HCI capabilities of SCALE:

• KVM Virtualization: Mature Hypervisor with good reliability, Guest OS support, and enterprise features.
• Kubernetes: Third Party Applications can now be deployed as single (docker) containers or “pods” of containers. Using Helm Charts, complex applications can now be easily deployed with dynamic charts. TrueNAS SCALE 21.02 also now includes the ability to register and use community-provided application repositories.
• Scale-out ZFS: SCALE will enable datasets to be defined as ZFS datasets or cluster datasets which span multiple nodes and ZFS pools. Cluster datasets will have a variety of redundancy properties.

Unlike other Hyperconverged Infrastructure solutions, TrueNAS SCALE will have deployment benefits as a single node, as a dual-node “high-availability” system, or as a cluster of multiple nodes. You can start off with a single node system today, and then scale-out. 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 SCALE Recognized by Forrester as Pioneer in Open Source HCI 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 is the leading open source storage system. While the historic focus has been on on-premises deployments, the flexibility of the architecture means that more customers are looking at how to use it for hybrid cloud applications. Organizations want the power to migrate data and workloads between on-premises, co-location (colo), and their favorite cloud platforms. There are three primary reasons to manage TrueNAS on cloud platforms:

• Applications in the cloud needed to access information in TrueNAS systems.
• On-prem systems backing up data to cloud storage.
• On-prem systems replicating to the cloud for disaster recovery.

TrueNAS CORE and SCALE can both be deployed in the cloud. TrueNAS SCALE is being developed for scale-out applications on multiple cloud platforms. While the iXsystems development team has enabled TrueNAS on Amazon® AWS, the architecture has been designed from the start to be open and deployable to other cloud vendors and platforms.

Network Center, Inc. (NCI) is a cutting-edge technology solutions company serving the Upper Midwest. As part of their toolset, they partner with iXsystems to provide TrueNAS storage solutions to their customers. As a technology partner, NCI has been looking at early versions of TrueNAS SCALE. Mike Pagan was interested in knowing how easy it would be to deploy TrueNAS on Azure. “Some customers are willing to work with hybrid deployments, with data on one cloud platform and on-prem storage on another,” said Mike. “Others want their early hybrid cloud deployments to be simple. I wanted to understand what it would take to deploy TrueNAS on Azure for our customers who wish to initially work only with a single hybrid cloud storage platform.”

Mr. Pagan documented his own deployment process in an excellent blog post (Archived), which documented how to create TrueNAS appliances on Azure. He first accomplished it with TrueNAS CORE, and then worked to do the same with TrueNAS SCALE. SCALE provided the additional tools to simplify operations and management within the Azure environment.

With TrueNAS operating on Azure, replication and migration of data and workloads between Azure and on-premises storage systems is now possible. The on-prem systems provide much lower costs per terabyte (TB) and also improve the performance of local applications. The Azure cloud platform, like AWS, makes it easy to spin up compute and storage resources for shorter term tasks.
To learn more about how TrueNAS works with the cloud, including on Microsoft Azure, contact iXsystems or Network Center.

The post Network Center takes TrueNAS to Azure appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

• KVM Virtualization: Mature Hypervisor with good reliability, Guest OS support, and enterprise features. This is already in a more mature state than Bhyve is on TrueNAS CORE.
• Kubernetes: 3rd Party Applications can now be deployed as single (docker) containers or “pods” of containers. Using Helm Charts, complex applications can now be easily deployed with dynamic charts. TrueNAS SCALE 21.02 also now includes the ability to register and use community-provided repositories.
• Scale-out ZFS: SCALE will enable datasets to be defined as ZFS datasets or cluster datasets which span multiple nodes and ZFS pools. Cluster datasets will have a variety of redundancy properties. The APIs for these have been completed and the UI in TrueNAS SCALE is being tested before trial release in the next few weeks.

Unlike other Hyperconverged Infrastructure solutions, TrueNAS SCALE will have deployment benefits as a single node, a dual-node “high-availability” system, or as a cluster of multiple nodes. You can start off with a single node system today, and in the future, you will be able to scale-out.
The high level release plan follows this updated process which has a two month cadence. Angelfish is the codename for the feature set described by a set of feature groups. Each “feature group” is described as either PREVIEW, ALPHA, BETA, RC, or RELEASE quality. This third version is called TrueNAS SCALE 21.02 (Angelfish) and is described as follows:

Users should read the release notes to confirm support for their particular use case.
The UI, while similar to TrueNAS CORE, has also been improved with some new UX enhancements across the ‘Networking’ and ’Settings’ sub-sections. Further UX improvements are expected to arrive in version 21.04.
In this version, we also introduced the new TrueNAS CLI that uses the API and persists all changes. This CLI will make it easier to script the set-up and configuration of TrueNAS. At a later date, the CLI will be backported to TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise.

The Kubernetes implementation has progressed most significantly with dynamic helm charts (as the application is installed, the user is prompted for specific configuration information) and community-defined application repositories. One terrific repository, TrueCharts, was developed independently of iXsystems by “Ornias”. An image of this repo within TrueNAS SCALE is below.

Cluster datasets require some additional TrueCommand features (TC 2.0 trials starting this month) to provide an easy-to-use WebUI to manage them. In the meantime, the CLI and APIs are complete and this feature group is now in ALPHA status.
TrueNAS SCALE documentation is minimal at the moment and relies on its similarity to TrueNAS CORE in addition to the Developer Notes and Release Notes. In March, the TrueNAS CORE documentation will be receiving a facelift which will greatly improve navigation and ease of use. Once that is complete, TrueNAS SCALE documentation will take shape as a clone of TrueNAS CORE. We aim for good TrueNAS SCALE documentation in the 21.04 release.
We appreciate the community feedback and bug reports and hope to get all those features to RELEASE quality faster. A special thanks also goes to the large number of community members who joined the development and test team. We’ve really enjoyed your contributions and teamwork and it has greatly contributed to the accelerated development process.
Is TrueNAS SCALE for Users or Developers?
At this stage of its Software Development Lifecycle, TrueNAS SCALE is still primarily for developers and enthusiasts and can be downloaded here. For Linux developers, there are many opportunities to contribute to the Open Source TrueNAS SCALE project and we have a vibrant Slack community for contributors. It is a well coordinated and managed environment to develop the best Open Hyperconverged Infrastructure. For more information, see this community post.
This TrueNAS SCALE 21.02 version is also intended for tech-savvy enthusiasts who have a single node, a backup plan, and a willingness to resolve any issues they find. The feedback from enthusiasts has been good and the new Kubernetes capabilities will simplify the addition of applications.
Users with standard NAS (NFS, SMB, iSCSI, S3) requirements are still advised to use TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise, which have a thousand times more data under management and over 10 years of operation. TrueNAS SCALE will inherit some of that maturity, but it will be a while before it catches up to the same quality and reliability. However, the journey has started and the progress has been great! 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.
To discuss this blog in more detail, visit our Forums.

The post TrueNAS SCALE 21.02 is delivered 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.

TrueNAS 12.0 is Released!

TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE is now available! TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise are now ready for production deployments. The merger of FreeNAS and TrueNAS into a unified software image is officially complete, delivering features such as ZFS Native Crypto, API Keys, Fusion Pools, TrueCommand Cloud Integration, and much more!

Learn More
Download TrueNAS 12.0

iXsystems Expands TrueNAS Product Line with R-Series Systems and Scale-out HCI Software

The TrueNAS Open Storage portfolio expands with the TrueNAS R-Series storage systems and the TrueNAS SCALE Open Source HyperConverged Infrastructure (HCI) software. The new R-Series storage systems include four models designed for maximum density, performance, Open Storage flexibility, and cost savings. TrueNAS SCALE introduces easy-to-manage hyperconvergence based on scale-out OpenZFS.

Read the Announcement 
TrueNAS R-Series

Recession-proof System Specials on High Availability TrueNAS Systems (While Supplies Last)

During these challenging times, keeping budgets under control is more critical than ever. Therefore, we’re offering two specific system configurations at special prices to answer the call. Both are high-availability and hybrid disk/flash systems, designed for 24×7 availability: the TrueNAS X10-HA offers 84 TB of redundant, entry-level enterprise storage, and a TrueNAS M40-HA is loaded with 1.5 PB. These systems are ready-to-ship in limited quantities and are available while supplies last. Click below for detailed information on each system.

84 TB TRUENAS® X10-HA $13.9K

1.5 PB TRUENAS® M40-HA $99.9K

Latest Releases

Here’s what the experts at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) had to say about TrueNAS in their recent validation report: “The combination of ZFS, open source, and a lean sales force provides efficiencies that enable iXsystems to offer high performance, feature-rich solutions at high value price points. We calculated a significant delta. Based on our testing and analysis, we found that iXsystems can typically offer up to double the performance at half the cost of their major competitors.”

Download the full report here

TrueNAS Open Storage Overview
In this video, we introduce the TrueNAS Open Storage family and describe the main features of TrueNAS CORE, TrueNAS Enterprise, and TrueNAS SCALE. Welcome to the Open Storage revolution!

Watch the Video

Open Storage Economics Advanced with TrueNAS M60
Mike Matchett from TruthInIT interviews iXsystems Executive Vice President Brett Davis regarding storage freedom in TrueNAS Open Storage products, and highlights the latest addition to the TrueNAS M-Series.

Watch the Video

TrueNAS Community Store

We’re excited to announce the opening of the TrueNAS Community Store! We’ll be adding additional items over Q4 2020 so be on the lookout to score new TrueNAS gear.

Shop TrueNAS Store 

Creating TrueNAS CORE Install Media
In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through creating TrueNAS installation media with either a USB stick or blank DVD. This step will allow you to set up TrueNAS CORE on your system.

Watch here now

More webinars

How to Upgrade FreeNAS to TrueNAS by Lawrence Systems
Thomas Lawrence of Lawrence Systems shows you how to update from FreeNAS to the latest TrueNAS 12.0-RELEASE, including your ZFS pools and iocage jails.

Watch the Video

iXsystems Launches Professional-Grade Storage for the Edge with TrueNAS Mini X
E-Channel News meets with iXsystems EVP Brett Davis to discuss the history of iXsystems and TrueNAS, the reasoning behind choosing Linux for TrueNAS SCALE, how TrueNAS can meet the needs of any storage environment, in addition to the latest TrueNAS Mini X.

Learn More

eBook on Open Source Storage

This free eBook explains how proprietary and cloud storage falls short and why Open Source is a better development model for storage systems. Learn about the advantages of NVMe/NVDIMM storage for the modern enterprise and why businesses need a unified data platform.

Download eBook

We’re Hiring!
We’re looking for people that are as passionate about Open Source technology as we are. Check out the link below to see what open positions we have and to send us your resume! We’d love to chat with you more about the opportunities here at iXsystems. View Open Positions

Tech-Tip #84
When connecting to the TrueNAS system with SSH or the web Shell, the Console Setup menu is not shown by default. It can be started by the root user or another user with root permissions by typing /etc/netcli

Links of the Month

• TrueNAS 12.0-RELEASE Has Launched! By Lawrence Systems via Lawrence Systems
• Say goodbye to FreeNAS, Upgrading FreeNAS 11.3 to TrueNAS 12 Release via PhasedLogix IT Services
• The OpenZFS Developers Summit 2020 Part 1 via Klara Systems
• FreeBSD Case Study: Netflix via FreeBSD Foundation via FreeBSD Foundation

Quote of the Month
“Throughout multiple storage expansions and Operating System updates, and generally putting TrueNAS through the wringer, we have never lost any data. That demonstrates how stable and reliable ZFS is as a file system and logical volume manager.”

– Ron Simpson, Operations Supervisor at McGill University

The post TrueNAS 12 & TrueNAS SCALE are officially here! – Issue #87 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

• KVM Virtualization: Mature Hypervisor with good reliability, Guest OS support, and enterprise features.
• Kubernetes: Applications can be single (docker) containers or pods of containers.
• Scale-out ZFS: SCALE will enable datasets to be defined as ZFS datasets or cluster datasets which span multiple nodes and ZFS pools. Cluster datasets will have a variety of redundancy properties and still support ZFS snapshots.

Unlike other Hyperconverged Infrastructure solutions, TrueNAS SCALE will have deployment benefits as a single node, an HA system, or as a cluster of multiple nodes. Start with a single node system and in the future, you will be able to scale-out.
Given the amount of existing software and new software, we have a release plan that lets the community confidently test and deploy SCALE as it becomes available. The high level plan follows this process.

“ANGELFISH”

Release numbering will be based on Year and Month. The first numbered release will come out in October and will be called TrueNAS SCALE 20.10 (Angelfish). The codenames will be alphabetically sequential and will be associated with aquatic animals that have scales or swim in schools (clusters).
The focus is on characterizing “feature groups” as either PREVIEW, ALPHA, BETA, RC, or RELEASE quality. Users should read the release notes to confirm support for their particular use case. Angelfish is almost feature complete in the NIGHTLY releases and includes the following feature groups: It should be noted that KVM has little testing by this community but is widely used elsewhere. Kubernetes will also be based on stable, released code, but the WebUI and Middleware are expected to be PREVIEW quality.
Clustered datasets require some additional TrueCommand features (expected in November) to provide an easy-to-use WebUI. In the meantime, the CLI and APIs can be tested and this feature group is classified as PREVIEW status.
We appreciate the community feedback and bug reports and hope to get all those features to RELEASE quality faster.

Is TrueNAS SCALE for Users or Developers?

Right now, TrueNAS SCALE is for developers and bug hunters and can be downloaded here. For Linux developers, there are many opportunities to contribute to the Open Source TrueNAS SCALE project. We have made it a very well coordinated and managed environment to develop the best Open Hyperconverged Infrastructure. For more information, see this Community post.
The TrueNAS SCALE Angelfish releases in Q4 will be good for tech-savvy enthusiasts and testers. We’ll let you know when TrueNAS SCALE 20.10 is ready.
In 2021, TrueNAS SCALE is expected to get to full RELEASE quality for a clustered system.
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 SCALE Release Plan appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.