Are these Virtualization features on the roadmap?

[beagle]

Maybe you should look at what I wrote and tagg the person I forwarded you towards? ;-)

I opened the ticket before your post but only posted here for reference after seen it.

Thank you for your heads up. Now I can refer @Kris Moore to my ticket: ;-)

https://jira.ixsystems.com/browse/NAS-110629

 

[Trexx]

@beagle Thanks for opening those enhancements "suggestions"... or whatever we are supposed to call them. I have put my upvotes in.

I realize this is a BIG change for TN as they are completely changing underlying virtualization platforms from TN Core, so it will take some time for TN Scale to become a robust Virtualization solution.

In the interim it looks like will have to do some CLI digging for now or leave those running on my Qnap for the time being.

 

[beagle]

@beagle Thanks for opening those enhancements "suggestions"... or whatever we are supposed to call them. I have put my upvotes in.

I realize this is a BIG change for TN as they are completely changing underlying virtualization platforms from TN Core, so it will take some time for TN Scale to become a robust Virtualization solution.

In the interim it looks like will have to do some CLI digging for now or leave those running on my Qnap for the time being.

Thank you for the upvotes. I feel a bit like a politician trying to lobby support for my bills. :D

The foundation for a robust virtualization solution is there. It just needs some polishing and time for the features to mature.

 

[warllo]

Thanks for creating these suggestions, votes have been cast.

 

[Trexx]

Thank you for the upvotes. I feel a bit like a politician trying to lobby support for my bills. :D

The foundation for a robust virtualization solution is there. It just needs some polishing and time for the features to mature.

Seem more honest and genuine than most politicians :). Agreed.. with KVM they have a good foundation to build on top of.

 

[Marjan]

Just to add to this, I am quite disappointed with TrueNAS UI in general, both Scale and Core. And the part for virtualization is worst of all. Like it's already mentioned before, a lot of features are missing.
And biggest disappointment is for adding/removing devices, like CD, new disk, NIC... I need to shutdown VM then start it again so it can see new device. Same problem as in TrueNAS Core. This is really bad.

I am currently running 22.02 RC1.1 and I expected more things to be better then in TrueNAS Core. At this moment I can see TrueNAS Scale only for using as NAS, nothing else. For virtualization and containerization I would prefer some other hypervisor.

All this being said, I know it's being worked hard on Scale, there are a lot of things to be done and I guess this doesn't have any priority. The NAS part have highest priority, I guess after this charts. A lot of things must be done to ensure stable environment. I was just hoping some things could be already here...

Hopefully next year will bring us more good things.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

And biggest disappointment is for adding/removing devices, like CD, new disk, NIC... I need to shutdown VM then start it again so it can see new device. Same problem as in TrueNAS Core. This is really bad.

My ESXi 7 here behaves absolutely the same. Which hypervisor does permit you to add/remove devices while the VM is running? In most cases this will just crash the guest operating system if you "pull" a network interface or disk that is active.

 

[Kris Moore]

Yes, the focus right now is primarily on containers, which has for a long while been the more desired functionality to get really polished on TrueNAS. Doesn't mean we don't care about VM's, just will be later in 2022 I suspect before you see any major changes on that.

 

[Marjan]

My ESXi 7 here behaves absolutely the same. Which hypervisor does permit you to add/remove devices while the VM is running? In most cases this will just crash the guest operating system if you "pull" a network interface or disk that is active.

First of all, I need to apologies for sounding like an ass. So, I am sorry for this, I just didn't realize while writing.

I haven't used ESXi recently, not without vCenter. At work I we have ESXi with vCenter with ~3000 VMs, plus Hyper-V servers in branch offices (~300), without VMM. At home I am just using Hyper-V server and TrueNAS Core, no ESXi. I tried Proxmox and XCP-NG, didn't like at all XCP-NG, Proxmox is pretty good, I just didn't saw any benefit of using it instead of Hyper-V in my use case at home. Nothing specific.

For example, if the disk or NIC is not in use i can just remove it from VM. No issues at all, nothing is crashing, IF I know what I am doing, which I do, make sure that nothing is using NIC, disk, CD... I never had any crash of any VM because something was removed.
Another simple example is when you need to mount some ISO file as CD device. To shutdown machine just so it will be able to see it properly? Utter nonsense. And this is true for Linux and Windows VMs on TrueNAS Scale. The OS installation ISO is mounted, VM started for the first time, installed the OS, all fine. I need to mount another ISO, for example for virtIO drivers for Windows, I need to shut it down, remove CD device, add new one pointing to ISO for virtIO drivers, start the VM. Really useless.
On Hyper-V server or in vCenter, this is all done while VM is up and running, adding disks, mounting ISO file as emulated CD.

Of course, adding and removing devices is done only when testing something, install OS, configure basic things, then add additional disks, NICs and configure the rest, start testing. When I see that I don't like what I did, or that it shouldn't be done in the way I did it, remove device add new ones, if needed. Or maybe I just forgot to add something in the start.

If I need to do something like this in production environment, which is really, really rare, I do shutdown the VM, then remove something, even at home.

I was just hoping that at this point virtualization would be much better and easier to configure then in TrueNAS Core.

It seems I am just whining around... Seems I already saw this how I would like it to be and didn't get what I wanted, like little kid not getting a candy

Again, I am sorry if I sound like I exactly know what should be done, changed... I know that all people in IXsystems are hard at work and are trying really hard.
Most important thing is that TrueNAS Scale can replace TrueNAS Core, having same features, working properly as in Core, to be stable. Only after this IXsystem can focus on adding new and better things.

 

[Marjan]

Yes, the focus right now is primarily on containers, which has for a long while been the more desired functionality to get really polished on TrueNAS. Doesn't mean we don't care about VM's, just will be later in 2022 I suspect before you see any major changes on that.

Thanks you for the reply. This is something that is obvious to me now. I just had high hopes for virtualization part to be much better than it is in TrueNAS Core. Better to say I saw it as done by now and now the little kid in me is disappointed .

Just my problem in my head...
Like it's already mentioned by beagle, virtualization part really needs improvement. I hope people will open those Jira tickets created by beagle and up-vote them.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Another simple example is when you need to mount some ISO file as CD device. To shutdown machine just so it will be able to see it properly? Utter nonsense. And this is true for Linux and Windows VMs on TrueNAS Scale. The OS installation ISO is mounted, VM started for the first time, installed the OS, all fine. I need to mount another ISO, for example for virtIO drivers for Windows, I need to shut it down, remove CD device, add new one pointing to ISO for virtIO drivers, start the VM. Really useless.

I perfectly agree with you on this point. I'd love to be able to change the virtual media in a virtual CD/DVD-ROM device at runtime. And of course other hypervisors do it, already. You just do not remove the device here - the virtual CD-ROM is present all the time. It's just empty or a "disk" is inserted. VMware allows you to "insert" an ISO file somewhere on the host's datastore or even a real CD inserted into the drive of the desktop from which you are managing ESXi.

Apart from that, yes, the bhyve instrumentation leaves a little bit to be desired here. But knowing that and given the rock solid performance of CORE in all aspects, I am still pretty satisfied with the solution. FreeBSD is and probably will be my #1 environment for everything ZFS.

To ease your pain a little bit when installing Windows: you can perfectly well create two virtual CD-ROM devices. One with the Windows install ISO, one with the VirtIO drivers. That way you can even access the drivers during installation and start with a VirtIO virtual hard disk right away.

Kind regards,
Patrick

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Most important thing is that TrueNAS Scale can replace TrueNAS Core, having same features, working properly as in Core, to be stable. Only after this IXsystem can focus on adding new and better things.

SCALE will never be able to run jails so I sincerely hope it will never replace CORE.

 

[beagle]

I hope people will open those Jira tickets created by beagle and up-vote them.

I would really appreciate if you could add your vote too. As far as I know we need at least 10 votes for the feature request to be assessed by iXsystems.

I have high hopes that in the long run SCALE will close the gap to more mature virtualization solutions and it will be able to be a fully featured hyper-converged solution (VM + containers + storage). But it takes time to build a solid solution and I rather see iXsystems investing time in the short term to mature and polish the current feature set in SCALE than adding more features.

Doesn't mean we don't care about VM's, just will be later in 2022 I suspect before you see any major changes on that.

I'm looking forward to SCALE 22.12 then. ;-)

 

[Marjan]

I would really appreciate if you could add your vote too. As far as I know we need at least 10 votes for the feature request to be assessed by iXsystems.

Already added my vote to all feature requests. Thank you for creating them!

 

[ideasman]

I've noticed that when updating, rebooting, or shutting down TrueNAS Scale, it seems to just power off the VMs rather than giving them time to shutdown gracefully.

I'm trying out scale for the first time and am mostly loving it except for this...

I've written a script to gracefully shutdown VMs and added it to the Init/Shutdown Scripts section as a shutdown script but it seems to run too late in the shutdown process.

Running the script manually from a shell works fine...