What's the consensus of FN11?

[diedrichg]

So FreeNAS 11 is officially out in the wild. What is the general consensus with its usability and stability? Is it a rock-solid successor to the 9.x series or is it another Corralgate?

 

[Jailer]

Seems to be going well for most judging by the posts in the forum. There's been a few issues reported but not enough to think they are more then edge case issues. I haven't seen any show stoppers or gotchas reported yet.

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

Seems like a solid release. We're really only using it as a NAS though. No idea if the ancillary features (VMs, jails, etc.) work.

Cheers,
Matt

 

[John Doe]

i like it, lowered my power consuption by 9-11w to 72w

but still a struggle with virtualization....virtualbox got dropped, VMs not stoppable, vnc server is not properly working.... fk this going to buy next xeon/amd gen and go for esxi.

i hope there will be a minimalistic train with possibility to reload additional packages

 

[chris crude]

Yes, no issues with its use as a NAS. I have made a Win10VM and Centos7 w/Gnome VM with no issues. My only problem, either it's a lack of features or my denseness and lack of Google skills, is you can't bind a specific NIC to a VM. Would like to test a PFSense VM or add pi-hole to Centos7 but network connection only seems to work on the subnet of the same address as the FreeNAS interface.

 

[scrappy]

Yes, no issues with its use as a NAS. I have made a Win10VM and Centos7 w/Gnome VM with no issues. My only problem, either it's a lack of features or my denseness and lack of Google skills, is you can't bind a specific NIC to a VM. Would like to test a PFSense VM or add pi-hole to Centos7 but network connection only seems to work on the subnet of the same address as the FreeNAS interface.

Probably my #1 gripe with FN11. Not being able to choose a different NIC or multiple NICs. It severely limits my VM setup options. I filed a feature request for adding multiple NICs to VMs, but who knows if/when it will happen.

 

[chris crude]

Probably my #1 grip with FN11. Not being able to choose a different NIC or multiple NICs. It severely limits my VM setup options. I filed a feature request for adding multiple NICs to VMs, but who knows if/when it will happen.

Thank you for re-affirming what I thought to be an issue. I thought I might be doing something wrong, I have used FreeNAS as a pure NAS for a while, without the jails and plugins, never tested FN10 so my knowledge is limited on this subject.
Also thanks for making a feature request.

 

[lupinehorror]

I'm running it as a VM (8 cores and 32GB RAM) on ESXi 6.5 and it's been solid from the start. IMHO the plugin/jail/VM implementation is too labour intensive on 11 (though i liked it a lot on 10!) though I think that improvements are planned for future releases. As an actual NAS system I couldn't ask for more though.

 

[sremick]

IMHO the plugin/jail/VM implementation is too labour intensive on 11 (though i liked it a lot on 10!)

Can you elaborate? I'm still on 9.10 and run a single jail, but this is the main role for my NAS so I'm cautious about mucking that up.

 

[lupinehorror]

Can you elaborate? I'm still on 9.10 and run a single jail, but this is the main role for my NAS so I'm cautious about mucking that up.

if you're experienced with running jails on 9.10 then you'll likely not run into issues. there were just certain things i could not get to work on 11.0 that i could on the now adrift 10. transmission and plesk being two examples (though owncloud was ok) so i run them on VMs in ESXi. others here can give advice and many people seem to be doing just fine on 11.0.

 

[BigMike]

I'm happy with 11.0. I just run it as windows storage, with Plex plug-in and Logitech Media Server in a jail - both run without problems. The daily status log emails are much quieter. And it may be my imagination, it just seems to be running one degree cooler than my last 9.10 version.

I tried the new graphic dashboard and don't really like it. It's pretty at first look. But information 'density' is less, and the data being plotted isn't as readable as the old-style graphs (which are great, tech-publication-ready format).

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

I tried the new graphic dashboard and don't really like it. It's pretty at first look. But information 'density' is less, and the data being plotted isn't as readable as the old-style graphs (which are great, tech-publication-ready format).

I second that opinion. The classic GUI is a better interface.

Cheers,
Matt

 

[diedrichg]

Well, I made the jump from 9.10-U5 to 11-STABLE. I'm happy so far. All I noticed was the new VM tab, otherwise the experience was a non-event. The transition was seamless.

I can't stand the new GUI. The new color scheme makes it feel like its trying to hard to look modern. I used Adblock Plus to block the hideous 1997 "network" background image. Nearly every screen was s-l-o-w and my system ground to a halt and became unresponsive for a bit on the Snapshots screen.

I switched back to the Classic GUI and it felt like running in a vacuum, everything was so much snappier and screen load times were unnoticeable. In general, I like the way the information is presented on each Classic GUI screen. I feel that if the side menu was modernized and the top tabs were removed then it would be the perfect appliance GUI. I truly hope the new GUI doesn't become a requirement.

 

[Johnnie Black]

Upgraded from 9.10 mainly because I was having some timeout issues with my Mellanox 10GbE NIC, everything running fine for now and my NIC issues seem to be resolved :)

 

[joeschmuck]

I think the new GUI is going to be a sore spot for anyone who has been using FreeNAS for a while, but we do know that the new GUI is not complete. Also FreeNAS 11 does appear to be stable for normal NAS operations, I have not tested out the other features to any great length but the forums are not riddled with upgrade complaints which is a very good thing.

 

[Jailer]

The forums have been very quiet with this upgrade, at least from my perspective. I've been around for a couple of version upgrades now and this one seems to be the quietest one so far. I think that speaks volumes to the amount of effort the dev team put in to make sure this one was right out of the gate.

 

[Spearfoot]

Upgraded my secondary server from 9.10.2-U5 to 11.0-RELEASE with no problems whatsoever.

I think @Jailer is correct about the devs working especially hard on this release to preclude any possible repetition of the Corral fiasco. If you browse around the internet you'll find that a lot of people are very wary of FreeNAS at the moment. For example: in the "FreeNAS 11 Released - Feature complete new GUI expected for 11.1" article at servethehome.com, the author states:

Our advice, if this is not a test system, hold off on this release. FreeNAS Corral was similarly brought to a stable branch then quickly pulled. We understand that decision, an iXsystems joined the discussion on the STH forums on why. Although we would not predict a repeat, we also are much more cautious using FreeNAS.

In reality, the FreeNAS 9.x train has always been rock-solid, but quite a few users were burned by the Corral experience and that's disenchanted them with FreeNAS in general.

It will take time, and no further missteps on iXsystem's part, to rebuild confidence in FreeNAS.

 

[ThreeDee]

I crossed my fingers and did the upgrade .. and .. everything is running great and "seems" a bit "snappier" .. the classic gui loads quicker. I had one minor hiccup with the plex plugin ui .. would show off when it was on and working just fine. Turns out I had 2 warden plugin templates installed (and I don't know if the extra one was created by the update to 11). I just deleted one of the templates and rebooted. All is good now cosmetically speaking.

The jury is still out on the new gui .. I am so used to the "classic" gui and where everything is at and what not.. I'll give the new gui a fair shot with 11.1 i suppose and see what happens.