FreeNAS and TrueNAS Unification Blog & Discussion

[morganL]

is there any plan to make trueNas enterprise OS so you came offer group of license depends on features of it , for example
E1 max ram 32G + max TB is 40 support 1 CPU
E2 Max ram 64 max TB is 80 support 1 CPU
E3 max ram 128 max TB 120TB support 2 CPU
And list of licence, I hope this will be available in future

The primary focus of TrueNAS Enterprise is to provide a well supported (and High Availability) hardware and software combination with a single throat to choke. We have to throughly test each combination to get there.

We're always looking for ideas. Can you describe the business problem you are trying to address and we'll see how we can help you. You can email to sales@ixsystems.com.

 

[NickF]

With TrueNAS Core on the horizon, I'm contemplating potential impacts which may be a boon...

Let me start by asking, if I have TrueNAS Core installed on a "Non-Certified" piece of Hardware, albeit "enterprise class" Supermicro/Dell/HP servers with HBAs and otherwise using supported hardware configurations...can I purchase the featureset of TrueNAS Enterprise and get things like fiber channel and HA? Obviously it would be all YMMV and reliant on community support...but it is at least it is worth asking the question.

 

[morganL]

With TrueNAS Core on the horizon, I'm contemplating potential impacts which may be a boon...

Let me start by asking, if I have TrueNAS Core installed on a "Non-Certified" piece of Hardware, albeit "enterprise class" Supermicro/Dell/HP servers with HBAs and otherwise using supported hardware configurations...can I purchase the featureset of TrueNAS Enterprise and get things like fiber channel and HA? Obviously it would be all YMMV and reliant on community support...but it is at least it is worth asking the question.

Hi Nick, That is not planned....Enterprise-grade requires extensive testing of identical hardware configs and access to those configs in our support team. If there's a business problem we can help with, please contact iXsystems directly.

 

[MRBIQ]

The primary focus of TrueNAS Enterprise is to provide a well supported (and High Availability) hardware and software combination with a single throat to choke. We have to throughly test each combination to get there.

We're always looking for ideas. Can you describe the business problem you are trying to address and we'll see how we can help you. You can email to sales@ixsystems.com.

i wanted to order trueNas but in fact the support team said we can not ship to your country
so with this idea this will be very easy for many people like my problem

 

[morganL]

i wanted to order trueNas but in fact the support team said we can not ship to your country
so with this idea this will be very easy for many people like my problem

Thanks.. its a good reason. Which country?

If you want to send an email to sales@ixystems.com and add my name (Morgan) we'll see if there is a solution. Its easier if we can specify specific hardware, but HA is more difficult.

 

[NickF]

Hi Nick, That is not planned....Enterprise-grade requires extensive testing of identical hardware configs and access to those configs in our support team. If there's a business problem we can help with, please contact iXsystems directly.

Hi Morgan,
While I do use FreeNAS currently at work (and, in fact, we had a sales call with iX about possibly buying a TrueNAS), I am talking specifically for use in my home lab. I know that is not something you are saying is currently on the radar, but a middle-ground between the standard free FreeNAS/TrueNAS Core and the "Enterprise" for us geeks that has Fiberchannel support would be a boon. With older QLogic dual port HBAs selling for under $20 on eBay, I would love to have a more robust connection between my FreeNAS box and my ESXI host.

I am an ubergeek. I keep an active subscription for VMUG. I pay for what is worth paying for. I hope there are enough of me out there that a model like that would be worth it to you.

 

[morganL]

Hi Morgan,
While I do use FreeNAS currently at work (and, in fact, we had a sales call with iX about possibly buying a TrueNAS), I am talking specifically for use in my home lab. I know that is not something you are saying is currently on the radar, but a middle-ground between the standard free FreeNAS/TrueNAS Core and the "Enterprise" for us geeks that has Fiberchannel support would be a boon. With older QLogic dual port HBAs selling for under $20 on eBay, I would love to have a more robust connection between my FreeNAS box and my ESXI host.

I am an ubergeek. I keep an active subscription for VMUG. I pay for what is worth paying for. I hope there are enough of me out there that a model like that would be worth it to you.

Nick, Thanks for the explanation. Could I rephrase the request as a "Development and Test License" for TrueNAS Enterprise? Not for production, and no commitment that all features work on any hardware. Why not make it a suggestion and list the key features you are interested in - we can review when 12.0 is ready. https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/truenas-bugs-and-suggestions/

 

[HoneyBadger]

Could I rephrase the request as a "Development and Test License" for TrueNAS Enterprise? Not for production, and no commitment that all features work on any hardware.

This is how I was envisioning things, vis-a-vis the VMware VMUG subscription that grants you a license to (almost) the whole software catalog. Absolutely not for production use, no formal support, just a "here you go, have fun" style of approach that lets you gain additional familiarity with the software.

As an addendum I'd suggest that application of a "Dev/Test" license make it very clear via the UI and other management components that it is "not for use in production" - just to head off concerns of someone trying to sneak this into production use in a small business.

 

[NickF]

Nick, Thanks for the explanation. Could I rephrase the request as a "Development and Test License" for TrueNAS Enterprise? Not for production, and no commitment that all features work on any hardware. Why not make it a suggestion and list the key features you are interested in - we can review when 12.0 is ready. https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/truenas-bugs-and-suggestions/

That is exactly the request Morgan. Thank you. I have done what you have suggested.

Honeybadger, as you seem to be of a similar opinion, can you perhaps vote for my suggestion when it goes live?

https://jira.ixsystems.com/browse/NAS-106158

 

[Dave Hamby]

Is there any way to set up a parts picker for home brew builds? Can pcpartspicker.com have a filter category that would restrict it to TrueNAS compatible processors and mother boards? Can it be as simple as a filter on processor, chipset, and on-board NICS and ECC memory required? PC Parts Picker can take it from there on memory, disks, etc. That might save a whole lot of forum questions of the genre "Will it TrueNAS?" It may or may not help the folks making eBay Frankenstein machines of corporate cast-offs.

 

[hescominsoon]

The biggest thing to look for is ECC ram compatible. You can use most any intel i-x cpu and xeon..thradripper and epycs also work. ryzen ecc support is not certified in many spots though.

 

[Dave Hamby]

Is file storage plus media server application an appropriate design use case for an iX Systems SOHO product? It's really hard to beat a corporate build on price without the mother of all junk boxes of salvaged parts to use in a build. Unless you are an IT infrastructure bubba, you should probably stick to new desktop bits that can be vetted at pcpartpicker.

I think it would be a bridge too far to keep up a list of vetted mother boards like TonyMacX86 does. Would it be reasonable to keep a list of processor architecture, chipset and Ethernet triplets known to work with TrueNAS? That list should be pretty easy to maintain. This would form the basis for setting pcpartpicker filters.

Back Story

Ah, AMD server bits having ECC are supported. That's nice to know. I missed that announcement and must confess that I ignore the forums until my puppy needs attention. Last time it needed attention was when a 2019 power glitch scrambled the system device USB nub. The OS is now on a single NVME 2.2 gum stick disk. Sadly, only one gum stick slot on my mother board.

The hardware guide is now 2+ years out of date. That's a lot of die under the bridge. Back when I built in 2017 or so, USB nubs were the way to go for system image storage. Today, dual NVME 2.2 is the norm. The hardware guide resource is not keeping up with motherboard and processor evolution.

I visited pcpartpicker.com and found that there is no way to save component search constraints. DIY NAS is not a pcpartpicker build category and there is one very dated example known to Duck-Duck. Pcpartpicker seemed to have limited filter settings for AMD parts and only a few parts in the database. Intel was very well supported.

I would have purchased an iX SOHO packaged system except at the time I was looking to run both Roon Core and FreeNAS together. Roon Core is a light weight application processor-wise and storage wise and runs easily in a modest Intel NUC. The FreeNAS build replaced a pair of obsolete Gen 2 Drobo that wouldn't mate up with a coming 2017 iMac. The plan was to migrate from directly attached storage to a NAS. Supporting Roon would mean that a SOHO product would need current virtualization extensions and current vector FP as Roon decodes media to PCM for transmission to a Roon endpoint. Hence the low end Xeon 3 build.

FreeNAS plus Roon Core is a compelling pairing as the music library file tree can be mounted directly as devices by the Roon VM. This works reasonably well because it solves the startup order issues between file server and music server. The only issue I've encountered is the VM gets confused when we have a flashover power fade. The VM has to be restarted following a glitching even though there is an APC AV UPS in that rack. The rack also has a Furman Elite power conditioner for AV lightening protection.

At various times while the VM architecture and configuration UI were in flux, I tried Roon on MacOS and Roon on Linux on a Mac Mini. Once the FreeNAS VM architecture became stable again, I came back to the Roon in a VM option as each two host architecture had its share of issues surrounding SMB share discovery and mounting. Boy do I miss SunOS and automounter.

 

[Ericloewe]

The hardware guide is now 2+ years out of date.

Fundamentally, it isn't. I do want to update and have been saying so forever now, but there really isn't much news in the entry-level segment. The only real change is that Haswell stuff has been discontinued, whatever-it's-called Lake is available with more cores and Atom C3000 is out and rather expensive.

AMD does not enter the picture because the entry-level ecosystem is barren and documenting the high-end, be it Intel or AMD, is a monstrous task best accomplished by whoever is planning on spending that much on a server.

Back when I built in 2017 or so, USB nubs were the way to go for system image storage. Today, dual NVME 2.2 is the norm.

That is very inaccurate. USB Flash Drives have been discouraged since at least 2017 by most people. NVMe is an option, but saying that dual NVMe is standard is ludicrous. Single NVMe is a good option, single SATA is a good option. Dual of either is overkill for the home, but a nice to have for little cost in an enterprise build.

 

[Dave Hamby]

In 2017 when I was planning out the build, USB flash and NVME were mentioned as an alternative system image mediums. In 2017 NVME storage seemed expensive and I wasn't quite sure what the motherboard wanted so I went the obvious USB flash route. After two failures, I found the use NVME recommendation so I investigated the NVME option again and found that prices had fallen but the SuperMicro motherboard docs were a bit ambiguous about just what the slot interface spec was. Some further poking (I checked what was screened on the MB) found that it was NVME 2.2 so I made the switch and the machine has been stable for 9 months or so. I suspect that in 2017 others had felt the same pain I had gone through but I didn't come across those lessons learned until my reading in 2019.

It's all a matter of when, where, and how you look. Like I say, a new build is an every 5 years or so evolution for me and maintenance is condition based and infrequent.

The hardware recommendations were generally helpful and I spent a good deal of time in them and the SuperMicro website to pick a motherboard that would run both FreeNAS and Roon Core. I settled on a workstation class board with onboard video since I didn't know what other jobs it would pick up. The machine runs 24/7 to serve music through out the house.

Today I was looking at Twitter and found that a poster had transplanted FreeNAS onto a QNAP box and that another had put FreeNAS on an HP desktop micro server. I don't believe either was ECC. One was an 11.3 deployment. The second was a 12.0 beta deployment. Interesting.

 

[danb35]

I don't believe either was ECC.

Quite possibly not. ECC is not, and has never been, required to run FreeNAS--it's just strongly recommended. And iX' social media folks don't seem to be as concerned about that as many folks here.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

The HP Microserver line supports ECC memory throughout. After all they are marketed as servers. Whether you decide to use that feature is another story. I really like those small cubes, specifically the Gen8 which could be bought dirt cheap for the quality and features.

 

[morganL]

ECC is like wearing a seat belt. The car drives perfectly well without it, but every million miles or so, you realize that wearing that seatbelt may have saved you some pain.

Having more memory in your system is like driving faster... it makes the seat belt even more valuable.

 

[HoneyBadger]

From Matthew Ahrens, co-creator of ZFS (with bolding for emphasis added)

There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem. If you use UFS, EXT, NTFS, btrfs, etc without ECC RAM, you are just as much at risk as if you used ZFS without ECC RAM. Actually, ZFS can mitigate this risk to some degree if you enable the unsupported ZFS_DEBUG_MODIFY flag (zfs_flags=0x10). This will checksum the data while at rest in memory, and verify it before writing to disk, thus reducing the window of vulnerability from a memory error.

I would simply say: if you love your data, use ECC RAM. Additionally, use a filesystem that checksums your data, such as ZFS.

 

[Dave Hamby]

I'm old school starting with 70's minis that had memory parity at a minimum and ECC in the 32 bit systems. ECC is beneficial with long running images like the FreeBSD kernel and ZFS. The intent is to catch memory corruption in the system image without pulling an illegal instruction trap or branching to neverland. Ionizing radiation from building materials remains a potential cause of memory image corruption. ECC and parity is not needed for systems that are restarted daily as probability is relatively low.

My "interesting" was not so much lack of ECC in the Dell and QNAS installs but that the hardware had not been picked for FreeBSD/FreeNAS use and hardware appropriate code there for NIC and older hardware likely Intel small scale and not Core or Xeon families.

 

[morganL]

I'm old school starting with 70's minis that had memory parity at a minimum and ECC in the 32 bit systems. ECC is beneficial with long running images like the FreeBSD kernel and ZFS. The intent is to catch memory corruption in the system image without pulling an illegal instruction trap or branching to neverland. Ionizing radiation from building materials remains a potential cause of memory image corruption. ECC and parity is not needed for systems that are restarted daily as probability is relatively low.

My "interesting" was not so much lack of ECC in the Dell and QNAS installs but that the hardware had not been picked for FreeBSD/FreeNAS use and hardware appropriate code there for NIC and older hardware likely Intel small scale and not Core or Xeon families.

ECC also catches memory errors before they are checksummed and stored in the filesystem..... where they then persist for eternity.