Important announcement regarding FreeNAS Corral

[Magnus33]

Unfortunately fairly early on we saw this was likely the path Corral was headed for a few obvious reasons.
Our company kept a eye on things since we love the idea's behind itx but we always unanimously veto the idea of using or buying the hardware.

The biggest one was the bug reporting system is basically pray and spray with no real control or monitoring.
There was no grace period for bugs getting deleted, altered or changed which lead to bug reports getting deleted joined to others with data getting lost of corrupted.
No one was in control and this lead to thinks getting overlooked for ages or just plain never noticed.
Hell we even tried hinting at a few of the issues that our guys/gals saw without violating our our boundaries since we had looked at it through business.

From a business point of view watching how things were dealt with always made it a no go and frankly we haven't been the only ones who felt this way.
Sometimes you have to slow things down and put a few important controls in place to speed things up.
If they had been there its likely this choice would have been realized quite some time ago.

The good thing is its something that can easily be improved on without any major changes.

 

[drinking12many]

Other than a few minor SMB issues in the first release mostly permissions related, its been pretty much completely stable for me. I have had to figure a few things out since its a new way of doing things but ISCSI has worked fine for the most part, a dual port intel nic I have isnt seen not a big deal personally I really didnt use it much but it would be nice to have. My HP NL40 is a little weak on the horsepower side with the new UI, but its all been functional even using plex long as it was direct. I hope this isnt a rush decision as I think there is some great stuff in the new one. I only use it at home so long as it works I wont be going back, but seems a shame to completely abandon it vs just slowly fix it. I understand the UI thing if its a dead end, but overall while not perfect its been pretty good.

 

[Eniqmatic]

Unfortunately fairly early on we saw this was likely the path Corral was headed for a few obvious reasons.
Our company kept a eye on things since we love the idea's behind itx but we always unanimously veto the idea of using or buying the hardware.

The biggest one was the bug reporting system is basically pray and spray with no real control or monitoring.
There was no grace period for bugs getting deleted, altered or changed which lead to bug reports getting deleted joined to others with data getting lost of corrupted.
No one was in control and this lead to thinks getting overlooked for ages or just plain never noticed.
Hell we even tried hinting at a few of the issues that our guys/gals saw without violating our our boundaries since we had looked at it through business.

From a business point of view watching how things were dealt with always made it a no go and frankly we haven't been the only ones who felt this way.
Sometimes you have to slow things down and put a few important controls in place to speed things up.
If they had been there its likely this choice would have been realized quite some time ago.

The good thing is its something that can easily be improved on without any major changes.

I kind of get what your saying but you also have to consider/remember that this is an opensource/free project. No one who runs FreeNAS in a business environment should have even been looking at this project given the infancy of it, even before it was released. After its been released for 6 months then take a look, at this stage no.

If it was really that critical to your business then it should be TrueNAS you were looking at, which wouldn't have even been looking at Corral for a long while.

 

[bass_rock]

Is docker support in the 9.10.3 nightlies already? Or is that yet to come?

 

[drinking12many]

I commend the FreeNAS team for taking this path. I haven't been in full investigation of Corral but I did roll out the upgrade for my VMware ZFS storage node and found no post-init scripts and limited iSCSI configuration and rolled back to 9.10 U2. That said, gents, lets leave the politics out of it - it takes a bigger person to say "Hey that thing we released isn't actually ready yet and so we're pulling it back from GA to tech preview." Meanwhile, commercial products, I mean big, big commercial storage solutions, make similar roll outs and then drive the product that's not ready to the finish line... but by time they get there it's on fire, leaking oil, full of trash, and everyone jumps out screaming.

So true I mean there was the one XtremeIO upgrade that made you back up all the data upgrade and restore all the data...thats just f'n sloppy.

Edit - At least I think it was XtremeIO, it if wasnt I apologize. We used another vendors flash products.

 

[Ericloewe]

PSA: There is an FAQ about migrating to 9.10.2 available in the Resources section. Please read it before asking questions!

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/migrating-from-freenas-corral-to-freenas-9-10.36/

 

[bass_rock]

PSA: There is an FAQ about migrating to 9.10.2 available in the Resources section. Please read it before asking questions!

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/migrating-from-freenas-corral-to-freenas-9-10.33/

Thanks!

 

[dreamerns]

Acknowledging failure does not necessarily mean you have to drop everything you've achieved so far. I'd even go so far as to say: Rolling back and continuing the 9.10 train is the easy way out. Truly owning up to something often coincides with sucking it up, staying true to a previous bad choice.

Let me be clear, I'm not running this in production. My homelab is my hobby, and in an enterprise environment I would never have migrated that early on. Nonetheless I invested a ton of time, reworking everything and make Corral feel homey. Now all that is crapcanned, and quite frankly the move annoys me deeply.

I will suck it up eventually. But don't expect me not to vent about it.

I agree with everything said here. I would also like to add that I never switched to 9.10 because it broke all the jails (they were ABI incompatible). Some of the plugins would be easy to recreate, but some jails would take lot of my time. Knowing that FreeNAS 10 was already underway with docker, I decided to wait. Yes, Corral did had bugs, but overall I was really happy with direction this was going. Just finished porting all my jails to docker containers and VMs and now this... NAS should be something you setup and forget (actually, with docker support it did open opportunities for additional playground) and not something that requires more time then my kids. I'll suck it up (because I have to), but I'm definitely not happy with this decision. I hope at least that I would be able to reuse my VM.

 

[William Grzybowski]

PSA: There is an FAQ about migrating to 9.10.2 available in the Resources section. Please read it before asking questions!

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/migrating-from-freenas-corral-to-freenas-9-10.33/

I don't think 9.10 Nightlies should be mentioned. People should just wait for 9.10.3 if they wish. Running nightlies for anything but experimentation is not advised.
it is usually a one way street, once you're in a Nightly there are no guarantees you can downgrade to a Stable, because of possible conflicts of database. In fact, this is even disallowed in the GUI.

 

[William Grzybowski]

Is docker support in the 9.10.3 nightlies already? Or is that yet to come?

Docker support will not be ready for 9.10.3.
You can, however, install a Docker manager on your own (e.g. RancherOS) using the VM feature to run your dockers.

 

[FFK]

Docker support will not be ready for 9.10.3.
You can, however, install a Docker manager on your own (e.g. RancherOS) using the VM feature to run your dockers.

So what is the timeframe for full-featured Docker support like on Corral (that is planned, right?)? This was a major selling point for Corral and waiting a long time for it to be reintroduced in the future versions will make things worse...

 

[Ericloewe]

Docker support will not be ready for 9.10.3.

Thanks for the info, updated. Can you comment as to whether it's planned for 9.10.4?

 

[William Grzybowski]

So what is the timeframe for full-featured Docker support like on Corral (that is planned, right?)? This was a major selling point for Corral and waiting a long time for it to be reintroduced in the future versions are making things worse...

9.10.3 is already at the final stage of the release process, just finishing up some last bug fixes and then to QA.
We will make our best to make it into the next major release, whatever that is going to be called.

 

[Ir13h]

If you are working fine on it, then great. No issues and you can just continue to run it.

No there is an issue

We need to wait for a little more clarity on whether there will be ANY updates going forward for the Corral platform.

Thats the issue

 

[FFK]

9.10.3 is already at the final stage of the release process, just finishing up some last bug fixes and then to QA.
We will make our best to make it into the next major release, whatever that is going to be called.

OK, thanks

 

[Michael Schultz]

I may be alone on this, but I feel like the entire OP sidesteps the real problem early adopters will face: docker v jails

It takes me 30 minutes to configure FreeNAS and about 40 hours to configure all of my vm's. Reverting from docker back to jails is obviously not going to happen if docker support on 9.10.* happens eventually, so I am stuck on Corral which is a dead end product until probably July or later. And when July rolls around I get to reconfigure all my dockers into new dockers because they are incompatible with 9.10.

 

[FFK]

I may be alone on this, but I feel like the entire OP sidesteps the real problem early adopters will face: docker v jails

It takes me 30 minutes to configure FreeNAS and about 40 hours to configure all of my vm's. Reverting from docker back to jails is obviously not going to happen if docker support on 9.10.* happens eventually, so I am stuck on Corral which is a dead end product until probably July or later. And when July rolls around I get to reconfigure all my dockers into new dockers because they are incompatible with 9.10.

Exactly. This is one reason why we need some clarification on whether or not 10.0.5 (i.e. Corral life support) is planned or if it is just left to die...

 

[Ir13h]

ok I have taken a breath :p

Is it possible at some point in the near future (like a week or two) to get a post detailing the projected 'diff' between what corral is and its now cancelled roadmap and what 9.10 is and its projected roadmap? ie a list of things that where in corral that will definitely be in 9.x.x and a list of things that definitely won't be.

besides my wasted time and effort (I understand you guys have wasted a lot more) the biggest bummer about this to me was that corral seemed like a modern platform, that once stable, would facilitate many great developments on top of it due it not having a legacy architecture. It feels like this long term potential is getting thrown out and because you have promised these new features you are going to shoehorn them into the legacy architecture.

 

[FFK]

ok I have taken a breath :p

Is it possible at some point in the near future (like a week or two) to get a post detailing the projected 'diff' between what corral is and its now cancelled roadmap and what 9.10 is and its projected roadmap? ie a list of things that where in corral that will definitely be in 9.x.x and a list of things that definitely won't be.

besides my wasted time and effort (I understand you guys have wasted a lot more) the biggest bummer about this to me was that corral seemed like a modern platform, that once stable, would facilitate many great developments on top of it due it not having a legacy architecture. It feels like this long term potential is getting thrown out and because you have promised these new features you are going to shoehorn them into the legacy architecture.

Fully agree

 

[FFK]

Also, it would very good to know in more details what are the major issues with Corral that warrant this drastic decision. With that info, those of us now on and continuing on Corral have a better chance of understanding issues we may encounter...