TrueNAS SCALE “Cobia” 23.10 has reached the “Release Candidate” phase after a very successful BETA version. We wish to thank the 1500+ Beta testers that found bugs and provided invaluable feedback. This Beta program had five times the adoption of previous TrueNAS releases and surfaced relatively few major issues that were then quickly resolved.
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.