Important announcement regarding FreeNAS Corral

[brando56894]

Wow, this is nuts. I have been following FreeNAS 10 development for about 2 years, ever since the original UI. I have been using FreeNAS 10 in beta form ever since November/December, and spending hours on the forums and testing and submitting about 100 bugs. I finally get a job as a Linux SysAdmin last week and step away from the community for about 1.5 weeks and in that time frame most of the team that I had worked with is gone and Corral has been put out to pasture!

I guess this explains why all my open tickets have been changing to Kris Moore, and also explains why there haven't been any new nightlies in a few days.

It really does suck that essentially 2 years of work is getting "thrown away" (but not really, more so parted out), but I guess I have been lying to myself the past few months and thinking that everything was okay, when I knew that Corral was a broken mess. Hell, even my roommate, who isn't tech savvy at all knew it was a broken mess since he saw how often things broke and how often I had to fix everything. It was fun at times, but also annoying at times due to how unstable it was. I had a few hardcore show-stopping bugs on my end that they just couldn't reproduce (my VMs would crash/stall randomly) and it made me consider my commitment to FreeNAS vs Linux a few times. 9pfs sounded amazing at first, and the bandwidth of it was stunning, but in practice it was a major pain in the a$$ compared to the tried and true NFS, I'm glad you guys are going back to it.

I had a love/hate relationship with the GUI, it looked so nice and when it functioned well it was awesome, but something would seemingly break every other day. These past few days I've had random issues where my VM disks act like either the drive is bad or the controller is bad, yet the physical disk is fine. I actually just posted a topic about it before I saw that Corral is officially dead. Please don't use the Corral name, it will confuse people and I thought it was a horrible name. I would just stick with the simple version numbers.

Now that I'm a Linux SysAdmin at a very large sports and multimedia company, that also uses ZFS, I think I'm going to go back to Arch Linux and ZFS on Linux, at least for the foreseeable future until 9.10.4 or so is released, the only thing that drove me back to FreeNAS from Arch was the GUI and the ease of use. So once you guys have that completely ironed out I may throw it back on my system just to make it easy to manage, but I need to get my ZFS skills up. Working on FreeNAS 10 helped me get this job so I don't consider any of my time spent on it a waste, it was definitely a learning experience for all parties involved!

I wish everyone at iX Systems the best, and I'm sure you'll turn the 9.10 branch into an amazing, stable, beautiful product that will steal me back from Linux once again, but I don't want to have to fix issues on my own server after doing it for 12 hours a day (3-4 days a week) at my current company.

 

[Michael Schultz]

Unfortunately people who upgraded from 9.10 to Corral also missed some key features (like the jails, working old plugins, more complete iSCSI, etc).

My biggest problem with this whole thing is that is seems like it was done because of iSCSI problem... a feature that was NEVER officially supported.. yet it somehow trumped the entire corral release. My blood boils every time I hear iSCSI is the reason for this...

 

[Ericloewe]

My biggest problem with this whole thing is that is seems like it was done because of iSCSI problem... a feature that was NEVER officially supported.. yet it somehow trumped the entire corral release. My blood boils every time I hear iSCSI is the reason for this...

No, you're completely wrong.

Problems with iSCSI are just one example. There's plenty to go around (you can start with @brando56894 right above you). iSCSI is also officially supported, contrary to your statement, and has been for a very long time.

 

[Kris Moore]

I hope they end up putting in the effort to make people on Corral a path to "upgrade" to 9.10.3. I feel like this should be a high priority features request of 9.10.3 because they did make us all think Corral was stable when they released it.

That is something we can certainty look at, its the least we can do.

 

[Kris Moore]

I was really looking forward to the cli. I think there is much more flexibility and straight forwardness.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

A light-weight CLI is indeed something we still plan to do post UI. Part of this plan is to not try and do a "kitchen-sink" approach. We are going to tackle a smaller number of items at a time, roll them out incrementally and cause the least disruption possible. (The last thing you want on your NAS)

 

[Kris Moore]

Can someone from iXsystems please comment if we will be getting any more Corral patches or is it just dead?

Sidenote: Please don't use the Corral name with another product. It's going to only add more confusion.

At the moment we have no updates in the pipeline, and our engineers are hard at work on 9.10.3 and beyond. However we will still accept pull requests and can roll updates if/when those arrive. And thanks for the suggestion on re-using the name, we will pass that along!

 

[Matt Platte]

My First Post: Hi Kris & Co. I have been wanting to dive into BSD+ZFS for ages. Seeing screenshots of Corral pushed me into action. Thanks! I now have an old Dell 7500 blowing cold air on my ankles, serving up files and Dockers. Still in practise mode. One day soon I'll learn about "trains" and "nightlies". It's all good.

As many others have said before me, I'm impressed by your willingness to pull the plug, so to speak.

Someday when you have time, look up the Valdocs saga, when Epson thought they could sell computers.

 

[St KaJa]

I have a direct install of Corral with an encrypted pool. Will encrypted pools import in 9.10.2 and/or 9.10.3 or will I have to reformat?

 

[mercxi]

If I were to use the Nightlies, would I be able to create VMs with gui? Or is that not available yet? Also do you know roughly how long it will be before 9.10.3 is out? Like are we talking about weeks or months?

 

[bodriye]

How long will the dockerhub containers be kept updated?

I have a fresh Corral install, are there plans to help migrate Corral users to 9.10.3?

Will vms and docker containers be migrated to 9.10.3?

 

[Kris Moore]

If I were to use the Nightlies, would I be able to create VMs with gui? Or is that not available yet? Also do you know roughly how long it will be before 9.10.3 is out? Like are we talking about weeks or months?

VM support is in the nightlies right now, but again, those are bleeding edge. If you can wait another 3-4 weeks, 9.10.3 will land with the feature as well.

 

[mercxi]

VM support is in the nightlies right now, but again, those are bleeding edge. If you can wait another 3-4 weeks, 9.10.3 will land with the feature as well.

AWESOME, looking for to it

 

[Neobright]

After waiting about 4 months for Freenas 10 / Corral to become stable and use as our new home server, moving over from Synology, I was initially a little disappointed about this news. The last piece of hardware - a Intel i350 t4 NIC - got delayed in the post and arrived yesterday. All set to get going this weekend only to hear this news.

But on review, I'm still confident in FreeNAS and looking forward to 9.10.3 coming soon. I think the right decision has been made and it is a strong move, but not doubt a little disappointing for the team.

Thanks @Kris Moore for the update and I hope you and the team can continue to deliver a great product and new features to us with 9.10.3 and beyond. No doubt you all feel a little shell shocked and disoriented, but there are plenty of new and exciting challenges to sink your programming teeth in to.

Best wishes
James

P.S. I'd also echo those requests for Corral users to be given the ability to 'upgrade' to 9.10.3 if feasible

 

[Scine]

I know I'm not the only one to say this but: To build a rock solid NAS software package takes hard work and dedication. To do it and release it for free is an even bigger undertaking.

I am just starting to build up my NAS box and chose Corral for my software based upon FreeNAS' reputation for rock solid technology.

This announcement doesn't change that for me. If anything, it solidifies it because you're willing to say "Hey, maybe this isn't ready for prime time". To me, that shows you're dedicating to making this as solid a piece of software as you can, and you're being honest with your users.

Sure, it sucks, but in the end, having the trust of your users (myself included) is important, and I think this was the right move for you guys.

Besides, if you didn't have a failure here and there in your career, you aren't pushing the envelope hard enough. :)

Thanks for this post Kris!

tl;dr: FreeNAS Corral as it was originally released is being relegated to “TECHNOLOGY PREVIEW” status while we work hard to re-base its exciting new features upon the rock-solid FreeNAS 9.10 base.


As many of you diehard FreeNAS® users know, we released FreeNAS Corral on March 15th, and the initial Community response was largely positive. There was a lot of excitement around the updated UI and the VM/Docker support, especially. However, we’ve also seen nearly half of the initial users revert back to FreeNAS 9.10. User feedback about this drop-off has been clear: challenges upgrading from 9.10, general instability, lack of feature parity with 9.10 (Jails, iSCSI, etc), and some users experiencing lower performance than expected given the increased demands FreeNAS Corral has on system hardware resources. With the subsequent departure of the FreeNAS Corral project lead, we re-examined the features, benefits, and issues with Corral and have decided to revise our plan for its future.

Before we communicate this new plan of record, a little background is probably in order. As some of you may know, the FreeNAS Corral GUI was built on MontageJS framework, originally working alongside the team at Montage Studios. Unfortunately, during the development of the product, the Montage Studio team disbanded, and the development of the MontageJS framework slowed to a crawl (this explains some of the browser incompatibility we’ve seen). So, our first goal following the release was to begin remaking the FreeNAS Corral UI (yes, yet again! …. /sigh) by basing the same UX on a more common framework. Not a huge deal, really, just some extra UI work for the team, but this time with a more common framework, allowing for faster development and more opportunity for contribution from the community. Once that new framework was in place for the UI, the next phase was to begin merging the FreeNAS 9 and FreeNAS Corral code bases and Engineering Teams.

However, in response to the volume of mixed feedback from the user community since release, we decided to undergo a thorough engineering review of the product and started to look deeper into the Plan 9 filesystem code, which allows VMs to access the host’s filesystem. In doing so, we discovered some holes in the architecture which make enterprise-quality file access using 9pfs impossible without a lot more effort and soak time, prompting us to to also re-think how to more safely enable this capability.

After weighing community feedback, and much internal deliberation at iX, we have decided that the amount of work still required to bring FreeNAS Corral (as currently architected) up to an acceptable standard for quality, reliability, and data integrity will take an unreasonable amount of time. The quicker path to a properly stable and enterprise-worthy Corral is to rebase upon the solid FreeNAS 9.10 code, bringing some of the new features that the current FreeNAS Corral offers into a more mature and solid platform. This process has already begun with the inclusion of VM container support and a brand-new Angular-based UI which is already available in the 9.10 nightlies (more on this below).

For the time being, the current release of FreeNAS Corral will be treated as an experimental branch and repositioned from “RELEASE” to “TECHNOLOGY PREVIEW” status, available for download and experimentation by the adventurous among you, but not for use in production environments. This also means it is unlikely you will be able to migrate configuration settings from Corral -> the next FreeNAS Corral product (however, your data will always be importable).

This new direction will allow us to focus our efforts on our next release which will merge the legendary stability of FreeNAS 9 with the whiz-bang features of FreeNAS Corral, while also swapping the GUI with the new Typescript framework. This provides the best of both worlds (stability + features) and has the added benefit of being a far faster path to a rock solid and stable FreeNAS release. In fact, many of the original team behind FreeNAS have already begun the process of taking the 9 series and merging it with some of the new features introduced in FreeNAS Corral, for the next stable and soon-to-be-released FreeNAS Corral.

In the meantime, our next release, FreeNAS 9.10.3 is currently slated for May, and here is a look at the current roadmap (subject to change as we move farther along, of course):

• New Angular-based web UI: You can test-drive the early work now in 9.10 nightlies prior to the upcoming 9.10.3 release.

• Expand and improve support for jails and jail-based plugins: For maximum compatibility with lighter system requirements.
  
  
• VM Support: We have added a new “VM” menu which allows you to host your own Virtual Machines on FreeNAS, landing in 9.10.3.

• Docker support: As a Virtual Machine-driven service.
  
  
• Improve support for DevOps-class alerting, PagerDuty, AWS Alerts, OpsGenie, and Slack (coming in 9.10.3).
  
  
• Local and distributed S3 bucket support: Initial work landing in 9.10.3.
  
  
• FreeBSD 11-stable base: Landing in 9.10.3.

Most of these items are already under active development, and we at iX look forward to sharing more details as they become available. As usual, we ask our beta-testing community to test drive these features in the nightlies and provide feedback and bug reports on the official tracker.

Thank you for your continued support and usage of FreeNAS. We appreciate all the users and fans who make this product better on a daily basis.

On behalf of the iX engineering team,


Kris Moore
Director of Engineering
iXsystems

Mod note:

There's an FAQ about moving from FreeNAS Corral to FreeNAS 9.10.2 in the Resources Section. You can find it at this link.

- Ericloewe

 

[indy]

I tested Corral for a bit and then went back to 9.10 after a few days.
Neither the server itself nor the interface felt stable enough for a production machine.

On a positive note I am really looking forward to the features of 9.10.3!

 

[rjgould]

This should be posted to the blog, it's not reasonable to expect everyone who might have switched to Corral to find this information on these forums.

 

[SnorreSelmer]

It's really sad to see so much work go to waste, but unlike a lot of the "drama-queeens" in the comments section of ServeTheHome, I'm sticking with FreeNAS. No point jumping ship when 9.10 is such a solid system.

 

[Nick Howard]

Why was it ever moved to being a Stable release is my question? It was clearly nowhere near being stable.

 

[ExcellentMong]

I know I'm not the only one to say this but: To build a rock solid NAS software package takes hard work and dedication. To do it and release it for free is an even bigger undertaking.

Echoing this sentiment, thanks to iX and both dev teams (9.10 and Corral) for their hard work and ongoing commitment to this open source project. I'm certainly grateful that such a high quality product is free and available for home use.

That said, I am among those who committed to Corral as a result of Docker integration and find myself in a tricky position. Having invested substantial time re-aligning to Corral, there was an expectation of continuity and stability with the product after the full release - and an expectation that the product shipped in a sufficiently stable state that development would be continued to resolve any remaining issues. As we (as users) do not have access to internal iX thinking, we can only trust in the developers to finish what was begun - so I'm sure I speak for many when I say that I feel let down by what has transpired. The significant level of change and instability in the project team since presents barriers to my ongoing use - as despite those such as Kris doing their best to communicate with the user base, there appears to be no clear roadmap to provide guidance to users on which features in Corral will be migrated to 9.10 and when, if at all.

iX appears to be caught on the run here - despite making a decision to cease development, there has clearly been no substantial planning on how to manage this process of drastic change. While I can appreciate that the dev's themselves are affected by this substantial change (it must be stressful as all hell to be trying to sort this out as an employee, and clearly there is much to do), this fundamentally challenges the confidence of the user base in iX as a business. How is it possible that having made the decision to terminate Corral, there was no definitive documentation on future features in 9.10 and rollback options from Corral provided to users? How can questions such as the numerous "can I roll back to 9.10.x from Corral" not have clear, definitive answers at the time of announcement of termination? Despite a number of staff in the Corral team having departed, my concerns are now related to the management of iX - not the potential of the product. It is exceptionally frustrating to feel like we (as users) are eating shit as a result of philosophical differences between teams that should have been addressed before shipping the product.

I hope that in the coming days and weeks, further detailed guidance on the pathways between the future product (9.10.3) and Corral with respect to features will be forthcoming to allow users to determine if the product still meets their requirements. For me, I am currently better off shifting to ArchLinux than staying on the 9.10 stream. I'd like to stay with FreeNAS, but I lack what is required to make this decision - a firm idea about which features relevant to me will be implemented in 9.10, and a timeline to determine if it is viable to wait for 9.10 to catch up the promises of Corral. This would go a long way to easing concerns.

Regardless of what happens next, I will continue to be grateful for the hard work of those who engage in open source development, and appreciate the efforts of everyone who has contributed so far. I sincerely hope that as more information is made available in the coming weeks, we will see some positive signs for the future of FreeNAS and the delivery of some of the exceptional new features of Corral in new versions of 9.10. I'd also add my sympathies and well wishes to those who are persevering with the project, as although we as users are unhappy, it must also be a difficult time for you.

 

[Visseroth]

There has been some in here that have been considerate and some that are outright Pi$$ed.
Both are understandable.

Those that are pissed need to remember that you choose to upgrade to something new, granted and most likely for the features. I don't blame you. Jails have been a bit clunky and the VirtualBox was dropped but it was that way because so much time and work was being put into version 10 aka Corral.
You also need to keep in mind that they didn't make this decision lightly. The carpet was ripped out from under them just as much you, as it was you who upgraded.
They were using MontageJS framework which disbanded which meant the FreeNAS team had to abandon Corral.
They didn't abandon Corral because they weren't up to the challenge, they abandoned Corral because they weren't given a choice! Their large investment of time and money was partially take away from them!

Now is all lost? Heck no! From what I've read some of the improvements that was done in Corral are being moved to version 9. Rejoice you crazy critters! New features are coming that make Jails and VirtualBox look like clunky toys!
Improvements will be made, the FreeNAS team took a hit but they didn't abandon ship, they are wiping off the dust and picking up the pieces!

Unfortunately for those that upgraded to cutting edge stuff they are suffering from some bleeding or time lost but nothing like the FreeNAS/iXsystems team. If you want to run cutting edge then prepare for some bleeding. You knew what you were getting into. You knew there would be bugs at the very least.

So, give the guys some credit, knowing they would pi## people of they posted on here exactly what happened, why they jumped ship on their new baby and what they plan to do to make up for it. They really are trying to provide a quality product for people.

I didn't see a single post from any of the FreeNAS team members here that said "Tough shat bud".

Anyhow, I'm done venting. I just wanted to say thanks to the FreeNAS team for all the hard work. I understand it's been tough and exhausting and there is much more work to be done but know that many out here still support and respect you people and look forward to future stable releases and updates.
You truely do build a remarkable product. I think there's much more work to be done but you're hard on your way.
And no, I'm not kissing butt for anyone that thinks so. I've been a bit pi## and frustrated myself but I also understand.