FreeNAS & TrueNAS Plans - 2020 and Beyond!

Kris Moore

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FreeNAS Community,

With 11.3-BETA1 now in the wild, and FreeNAS on the march towards 11.3 general availability in the coming months, I wanted to take a moment and give you a heads up on what’s on the horizon for 2020.

As you may know, 12.0 is shaping up to be a significant release. The biggest changes coming to the product family will be a big update to ZFS, which brings us in sync with upstream “OpenZFS 2.0” (the official merging of FreeBSD support with the ZFS on Linux Project). Major features include native ZFS Encryption, Allocation Classes (Making a special vdev on flash for metadata), performance improvements, and more. We anticipate having 12.0 available for BETA sometime in mid 2020. While this is actively in development right now, we’ve also got some other exciting things going on behind the scenes.

First up, FreeNAS and TrueNAS are going to be getting much closer. As most of you know, TrueNAS is built upon FreeNAS, sharing the same open-source base across products. Up until this point we’ve maintained each release separately, with different source repos, build processes, QA frameworks, etc. With 12.0 we decided to make all of our engineers and contributors lives easier by unifying them into a single image. This will provide a huge efficiency and productivity boost by allowing us to streamline our development and QA efforts, and it will have the added benefit for the FreeNAS community of higher quality releases and documentation. Going forward, the same extensive QA testing we put into TrueNAS will be directly beneficial to FreeNAS as well. No FreeNAS functionality will be harmed in the making of this merge, so rest easy :smile:

Next, we’re going to be hard at work in 2020 to make our 12.0 code portable across multiple OS platforms. The middleware at the core of FreeNAS is already pretty portable today, and we want to start extending its reach. This also allows us to work on some new and exciting software products, complementary to FreeNAS, without disturbing or compromising the stability or reliability users depend on. We're excited to share what we're working on, but we're still early in the R&D phases, so we don't have much to reveal yet. Stay tuned for more info later next year!




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So with that, please pardon any of our dust on the 12.0 development side over the coming months. 11.3 is already shaping up to be the best FreeNAS and TrueNAS release ever, and we’re super stoked for what’s going to be landing for 12. These are exciting times for FreeNAS and we’re looking forward to the journey with you in 2020 and beyond.
 

Bostjan

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Can you please elaborate this: “...to make our 12.0 code portable across multiple OS platforms.“
Thank you.
 

castle

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Hi,

are you saying that in the future, there is a chance that we would get the option of running The gui/middleware of FreeNAS on ie Debian with ZFS? Or am I jumping to conclusions here?
 

Kris Moore

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Hi,

are you saying that in the future, there is a chance that we would get the option of running The gui/middleware of FreeNAS on ie Debian with ZFS? Or am I jumping to conclusions here?

Maybe... ;)

We're working on our next additions to the FreeNAS/TrueNAS family of storage software and will be using the same middleware and UI for much of it. More details in the coming months as we get things into shape in the R&D lab, but we're very excited for what's coming! Stay tuned!
 

majerus

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How great would it be if FreeNAS would run on Linux and support containers natively :) . If the code base for FreeNAS and TrueNAS are merged does that mean features such as FC, HA would be enabled on the FreeNAS build?
 

Kris Moore

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How great would it be if FreeNAS would run on Linux and support containers natively :) . If the code base for FreeNAS and TrueNAS are merged does that mean features such as FC, HA would be enabled on the FreeNAS build?

Many of the features in TrueNAS are paired with specific hardware in our M/X series units, such as HA, Enclosure Mgmt, etc, so they will not be enabled on a default FreeNAS install.
 

Bostjan

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Haven't you also change some other project that was FreeBSD based to Linux based. Was that because of drivers or were there other reasons? Are the reasons the same to switch to Linux based "FreeNAS"?
 

Jailer

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silverback

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How great would it be if FreeNAS would run on Linux and support containers natively :) . If the code base for FreeNAS and TrueNAS are merged does that mean features such as FC, HA would be enabled on the FreeNAS build?

Not to mention the ability to move away from Byhve, which is still a very immature platform.
 

HoneyBadger

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they will not be enabled on a default FreeNAS install
I notice this doesn't say "they will be unavailable" just "they will not be enabled on a default install" ...

So if I launch the installer with the --please-enable-HA-and-FC --yes-i-know-what-i-am-doing flags, it might work? ;)

I'm looking forward to the improvements that can be gleaned from merging the two codebases; finally I'll only have to memorize one set of tunables/sysctls and their defaults.
 

Kris Moore

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I notice this doesn't say "they will be unavailable" just "they will not be enabled on a default install" ...

So if I launch the installer with the --please-enable-HA-and-FC --yes-i-know-what-i-am-doing flags, it might work? ;)

I'm looking forward to the improvements that can be gleaned from merging the two codebases; finally I'll only have to memorize one set of tunables/sysctls and their defaults.

Let me clarify. There will be a combined / shared image. Those features are exposed only on our Enterprise platforms, and also still have a TrueNAS license key (for support purposed and to unlock it on that HW)
 

Herr_Merlin

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Many of the features in TrueNAS are paired with specific hardware in our M/X series units, such as HA, Enclosure Mgmt, etc, so they will not be enabled on a default FreeNAS install.
You did not mention FC. Are we getting FC?
 

Kris Moore

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Linux is now the main development platform for OpenZFS. It means that iXsystems customers need an alternative if FreeBSD encounters difficulties to stay on the train. Therefore, porting FreeNAS to Linux is a wisdom choice.

Just to clarify, FreeNAS as it exists will continue on FreeBSD for 12.0 and beyond. This will be bringing some of the same software-base to Linux to unveil some new products that are Linux-based in the coming months. If you currently are happy with FreeNAS as it sits today, you can expect to keep updating it on BSD going forward.
 

Herr_Merlin

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I do run FreeNAS in our enterprise as secondary and archive Storage. For that have the ability to use FC would be great :)
Plus you can get 8G FC Switches with license and HBA for nearly nothing on ebay.
 

Patrick M. Hausen

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How great would it be if FreeNAS would run on Linux and support containers natively :)
It does support containers natively. Native FreeBSD containers are called "jails".

Patrick
 
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Any chance iX could start releasing end of life dates six to twelve months in advance of stopping security updates to versions? For example, I have a lot of production kit running 11.1-U7 and although I keep hearing 11.1 is coming EOL 'soon' it would be good to have a fixed date so that I can plan updates etc.
Thanks
 
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