Announcing TrueCommand

Chris Moore

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Please see if that provides an easier way to see the status of your storage pool(s) with hundreds of drives.
Can't test it because it is limited to 50 drives and it needs 11.2 and I am still using 11.1-U7. I might be able to setup a test environment. We have a new 60 drive server scheduled for delivery, but I don't have a firm date. I could put 11.2 on it for burn-in and testing.
 

Chris Moore

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50 total (across all systems)
Is it counting data drives only or do the boot drives and SLOG / L2ARC drives count against that number? Will this preview version even look at a system that has more drives than 50 or will it just show the first 50 drives?
 

kenmoore

TrueCommand Project Lead
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You can register a single system with more than 50 drives just fine. The license limitation will just prevent you from registering any more until you get an enhanced license, meaning you will lose out on the multi-system functionality.

Since we know that disks per system is not an incremental type of statistic, TrueCommand will let you register and connect to NAS's until you reach/exceed the disk number. If you happen to have more systems pending once you reach the limit, then it will simply stop connecting to any new NAS's but will still provide full functionality for the systems that you *did* connect.
 

kenmoore

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The number of disks per system used in the license checks includes all drives available/used for the storage pools (including L2ARC and SLOG), but excludes boot device(s) for the NAS itself.
 

Yorick

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First attempt to download didn't kick off a download but did get me to the getting started page. Maybe because cookie consent hadn't been set yet? Second attempt, after clicking through consent form on getting started page during first attempt, worked.
 

CaraquetFlyer

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Maybe because cookie consent hadn't been set yet? Second attempt, after clicking through consent form on getting started page during first attempt, worked.

Seems that It was the same thing for me. Accepting the cookie seems to loop around the download link so I had to tried again and second time was working.
 

Brezlord

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The download keeps failing at 525MB or it fails to start. Browser reports network error. Any one else have this issue?
 

Patrick M. Hausen

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Looks fantastic, one more step to replace vSphere some day.

But guys ... the installation instructions - seriously? VirtualBox, ESXi ... no bhyve/FreeNAS? I will figure it out, probably. But still - what else would be the virtualisation platform of choice?

Kind regards,
Patrick
 
Last edited:

Patrick M. Hausen

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So ...
  • New VM
  • 1 core
  • 8 GB memory
  • 80 GB disk
  • virtio disk
  • virtio network
  • VNC 1024x768 (FreeNAS default)
Boot, beasty menue, some kernel messages, then blank screen with a cursor top left and no more progress ...

Any hints welcome.

Thanks!
Patrick
 

Patrick M. Hausen

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Serial console works as the gods of Unix intended ... ;)

Patrick
 

kenmoore

TrueCommand Project Lead
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@Patrick M. Hausen
It is generally not recommended to run your NAS-monitoring system within a VM on your NAS itself - hence why we don't give instructions for that.

As far as bhyve goes, I have heard that serial console is much more reliable than VNC but I have never tried it out myself. Seems like your experience would back up that statement though... ;-)
 

Patrick M. Hausen

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Short summary for the people who know this stuff:
  1. Create VM without VNC and use serial console
  2. Use installer as intended
  3. Power off
  4. Remove CD-ROM device
  5. The interesting part ...
Code:
dd if=/dev/zvol/zfs/vm/truecommand-disk0 of=/mnt/zfs/bla bs=1m
mdconfig -a /mnt/zfs/bla
mkdir /mnt/bla
mount -t msdosfs /dev/md0p1 /mnt/bla
cd /mnt/bla/EFI/BOOT
cp BOOTX64-TRUEOS.EFI BOOTX64.EFI
cd
umount /mnt/bla
rmdir /mnt/bla
mdconfig -d -u 0
dd if=/mnt/zfs/bla of=/dev/zvol/zfs/vm/truecommand-disk0 bs=1m


6. Start VM
7. Enjoy ...

The installer does not create an EFI loader that bhyve recognizes, hence the commands above. If I'm not mistaken the "dance" with dd should not be necessary, but I could not find a way to directly access the partitions inside /dev/zvol/truecommand-disk0 even with volmode=geom set.

HTH,
Patrick
 

danb35

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Patrick M. Hausen

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* It runs
* It produces graphs
* But it doesn't do much ...

From the blog post and the feature list I got the impression that it was supposed to be a management interface? I.e. provision new datasets, VMs, create snapshots, roll back snapshots, change configuration of VMs ... stuff like that.

What am I missing?

Kind regards,
Patrick
 

kenmoore

TrueCommand Project Lead
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TrueCommand is a management interface for the team/fleet - not a replacement for individual NAS UI. If you only have one system administrator and/or one NAS, then TrueCommand will probably not be your cup of tea. The moment you start having a bunch of NAS's or a team of system administrators, that is where TrueCommand shines by streamlining basic operations and providing audit mechanisms.

The first phase of TrueCommand is mostly statistics/reporting in additional to all the multi-user, multi-NAS functionality. In future development phases we are planning to start bringing more cross-NAS interoperability and control into TrueCommand as well - things which cannot be done by a single NAS very easily (if at all).
 

Patrick M. Hausen

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I am specifically testing it because of the multi administrator part. It is not very useful for us if said administrators cannot create VMs. I was hoping for something like vCenter when I read the announcement ...

Kind regards,
Patrick
 

Scharbag

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Installed it on an ESXi VM. Some functions work but it just spins and says "Fetching Data" on the bottom half of the right hand pane for the Metrics and Storage tabs. So, I am not really sure what it is trying to tell me.

Tried both Chrome and Safari browsers.

The "Reporting" tab is also not working as it just spins with a "Please Wait" graphic.

Cheers,
 

sretalla

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I noticed that after upgrading 2 of my systems to 11.2-U4.1 that there were a few issues with them in the TrueCommand console.

First, they were both reporting Uptime < 180 seconds almost all the time (over 800 events between the 2 servers in around 24 hours).

Then, one of them seemed offline in the console, but was clearly online and on it's own page showed an uptime of over a day, so I re-entered the password and all came good again... but then the other one went offline... same remedy attempted, but no dice.

Then I removed it and attempted to re-add which gave me "restricted by license" (in a kind-of not very obvious way at the bottom of the screen) and would not add.

I am certain that I have no more than 50 disks in my entire environment. I am not aware of any other license restrictions.

Also worth noting that the way the events were resolved seemed really inefficient since I had used select all and "resolve selected", but this seemed to be running from the top of the list (visible on the first screen) and hence was refreshing the list every time the top item was removed... over 800 events and 5-10 minutes later it was done. Can I suggest either going bottom-up instead or just freezing the refresh until it's done?
 

mgumbert

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May 13, 2019
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Seems like an interesting concept and a central platform to manage storage systems would be very useful. However, I'd be embarrassed to deploy TrueCommand with all the child-esque avatars and farm animals for user profiles and teams. This is a cool concept platform, but it needs some re-working to be more professional in style and appearance for me to utilize this in a client environment.
 
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