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TrueNAS SCALE Dragonfish Reaches BETA

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February 6, 2024

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TrueNAS | TrueNAS SCALE

The Dragonfish chapter of TrueNAS SCALE has begun. Building on its foundation of high availability, scale-up storage, and easy deployment of containerized applications, TrueNAS SCALE is now poised to expand its capabilities even further. Today, we announce the availability of TrueNAS SCALE Dragonfish BETA 24.04, another major leap forward for TrueNAS. Dragonfish is the alphabetical and chronological successor to SCALE 23.10, which has successfully grown the TrueNAS SCALE user base beyond 100,000 systems in less than 24 months. Dragonfish adds over 1,000 improvements with the most notable being related to security, auditing, cloud backup, reporting, and log management. TrueNAS SCALE Dragonfish Dragonfish has been through multiple internal QA testing stages with nightly access by the development community. With this BETA release, Dragonfish has reached the point where community testers can begin to explore the new features and functionality. We expect to release Dragonfish for production in Q2 2024, as the SCALE 24.04 name (yy.mm of target release date) indicates. TrueNAS Enterprise and associated appliances are currently based on TrueNAS 13.0 or SCALE 23.10. Dragonfish will be added as an option after its formal release in Q2 this year.

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. Developing TrueNAS 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.

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