From FreeNAS 11.3 to TrueNAS Core 12 - Upgrade Stories

Stilez

Guru
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Apr 8, 2016
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529
I'm not doing anything complicated .. just some SMB shares and a couple jails .. but Beta2 has been rock solid for me
This, but a few bugs that are a pain (annoyance not that bad) look to be fixed in RC1 when released, or BETA3 if there is one. Main ones for me - during some zfs operations mainly scrub but could be others, in some limited cases (dedup on a fast pool), the cpu can be starved into 100% load. Also, web UI can lose front/back end connections and be poor responsive/slow. And pools with both zvol and dataset the -x/-o options on zfs recv -R cause issues. Jira is a good way to see what other people have reported. But nothing data threatening ive come across. However at this point, no benefit to diving in on beta 2.1, even though I agree basically rock solid. Wait for those.
 
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emk2203

Guru
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Nov 11, 2012
Messages
573
Just want to share my experience with upgrading one of my systems to BETA2.1. We are talking about a low-end SOHO system, an AMD Turion II Neo with 1.5GHz, 8GB RAM. The CPU has a passmark value of 587, so really, really slow (a Core2Duo T6600 @ 2.2GHz has 732, so 25% faster).

It is still usable under TrueNAS-12-BETA2.1. With scrubbing and one torrent jail, CPU goes to 90%, still 0.7 GB RAM free during the process. JUst the GUI idling is anything from 25% during loading to 3% after the page is ready.

Overall, sufficient performance on an absolutely low-range system. I had to recreate my jail, though. Not an issue, even port forwarding with NAT to the jail enabled worked out-of-the-box and was easy to switch on and find in the UI.

Scrub tiimes go down from 24 h to 10 h (est.).

Downside of the fast scrub: A disk-intensive operation like a search over the dataset with find takes really long. We are talking minutes now...
 

diskdiddler

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Jul 9, 2014
Messages
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@emk2203 You know there's one particular batch of memory type which will give you 16GB on that little puppy, right?
 

emk2203

Guru
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Nov 11, 2012
Messages
573
@diskdiddler I do know, but honest question: Is it really worth it? The N40L is quite underpowered in terms of CPU. My understanding was that giving it more memory is just a waste, because the CPU is the bottleneck, not the RAM. What's your experience with the N54L? And if it's worth it, could you jog my memory with a name or link for the RAM?
 

diskdiddler

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@diskdiddler I do know, but honest question: Is it really worth it? The N40L is quite underpowered in terms of CPU. My understanding was that giving it more memory is just a waste, because the CPU is the bottleneck, not the RAM. What's your experience with the N54L? And if it's worth it, could you jog my memory with a name or link for the RAM?

Had to hunt around some old stuff but I believe you want to locate this
CT102464BA160B or something identical to it.

I don't know if it's worth it, it's been a while for me. I think the important thing is that the system isn't overloaded with junk. I wouldn't run VMs on that machine at all and I'd only run a handful of jails, but from memory, mine served me really well and for file only access I noticed little to no change upgrading, it was kind of a disapointment to be honest.

I let mine go around late 2018, I think. I know overhead for FreeNAS would be slowly slowly going up, but not much. If you're only keeping it as a nice SMB dump for the house, she's probabbly still ticking along lovely.

Oh to be clear - I'm not positive the ram is going to solve any issues at all, the poor CPU is not powerful - but if you can identify memory as being an issue, that will solve it.
 

dcol

Dabbler
Joined
May 1, 2020
Messages
28
RC1 is out. If I update to RC1, will it affect my one pool with two datasets such that I can't go back to 11.3? If not, I will give it a go.
 

Ericloewe

Server Wrangler
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Feb 15, 2014
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20,175
Only if you explicitly enable unsupported feature flags (i.e. upgrade the pool):
 

dcol

Dabbler
Joined
May 1, 2020
Messages
28
Looks like all the features are enabled or active on my pool. And I saved the config. So I should be good.
 

diskdiddler

Wizard
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Jul 9, 2014
Messages
2,374
I took the plunge a couple of hours ago.

Seems to have installed fine over the top of 11.3.

My VMs came up and my VM that is mounting back via SMB into the server is working. So thus far, it seems all good.
 

dcol

Dabbler
Joined
May 1, 2020
Messages
28
update took less than 5 minutes and everything works, even the jail to my surprise.
 

Steasenburger

Explorer
Joined
Feb 12, 2020
Messages
52
I just upgraded from Freenas 11.4 to Truenas 12 RC1 and everything went super smooth in about 5 minutes.
Even my VM with docker etc normally restarted after the upgrade and i finally can passthru my PCIe USB controller :D

Thanks alot to all of iXSystems for developing and all people for testing this great piece of software :)
 

diskdiddler

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Actually one of my machines refuses to talk to 2 of my SMB shares - while another works fine (but hasn't been rebooted, yet)

Ok so developers, those listening - good work (OR good work changing how reporting measures things?)
I'm very impressed, as someone who doesn't understand all this........... these graphs appear to be, clearly improved?! (anyone else?)

lcMKioB.png




R3xaAyu.png



P4KDNiI.png


Can anyone elaborate if that's measuring things better or simply better code?
This is unheard of (generally) in computing. I've been using Windows since 3.11 and I can tell you, the amount of times I've seen quotes of "runs better on your old hardware" (and found this to be entirely untrue) is endless.

This outright, appears to 'do stuff better'
Thoughts?
(Well except my SMB issue but I'll figure it out)
 

diskdiddler

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Jul 9, 2014
Messages
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I just upgraded from Freenas 11.4 to Truenas 12 RC1 and everything went super smooth in about 5 minutes.
Even my VM with docker etc normally restarted after the upgrade and i finally can passthru my PCIe USB controller :D

Thanks alot to all of iXSystems for developing and all people for testing this great piece of software :)

Wait can I pass through a USB port on a VM now? - I have a cute little 'cups' server running off an OrangePi Zero and I'd love to put itinto a VM.
I tried using a JAIL to do Cups but ... I kind of detest jails.
 

morganL

Captain Morgan
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Can anyone elaborate if that's measuring things better or simply better code?
This is unheard of (generally) in computing. I've been using Windows since 3.11 and I can tell you, the amount of times I've seen quotes of "runs better on your old hardware" (and found this to be entirely untrue) is endless.

This outright, appears to 'do stuff better' Thoughts?

We've seen some good benefits from FreeBSD 12, Open ZFS2.0 and the general improvements in Samba.. it gets reflected as positive (20-30%) increases in max performance on a system and should be seen as lower CPU and disk utilization on normal workloads. More of ZFS is asynchronous and so fewer threads waiting for I/Os to complete.

My guess is the ARC increases are a function of rebooting and building ARC again?
 

diskdiddler

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Jul 9, 2014
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We've seen some good benefits from FreeBSD 12, Open ZFS2.0 and the general improvements in Samba.. it gets reflected as positive (20-30%) increases in max performance on a system and should be seen as lower CPU and disk utilization on normal workloads. More of ZFS is asynchronous and so fewer threads waiting for I/Os to complete.

My guess is the ARC increases are a function of rebooting and building ARC again?

Well it's very very rare in tech and appreciated.
Tell me - can I mount my USB port now? Pass through my Dymo Printer to a linux VM running CUPS?
 

diskdiddler

Wizard
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Jul 9, 2014
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The focus is on PCIe pass through. So if the USB controller can be passed through as a PCIe device, then it may work. Youtube video on this is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0MAZBX7P-U

Sorry one more thing.............
Do we think I can pass through a single USB port.
Passing through other USB ports, in my particular situation, would be, very, unwise.
 

diskdiddler

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Jul 9, 2014
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I have run the 2 commands in the video and my system def supports VT-d as well as this:


xhci0@pci0:0:21:0: class=0x0c0330 card=0x096915d9 chip=0x19d08086 rev=0x11 hdr=0x00
vendor = 'Intel Corporation'
device = 'Atom Processor C3000 Series USB 3.0 xHCI Controller'
class = serial bus
subclass = USB
cap 01[70] = powerspec 2 supports D0 D3 current D0
cap 05[80] = MSI supports 8 messages, 64 bit enabled with 1 message




So if I go and mount my USB controller (which has only 3 physical ports for some reason) 2 of the ports are literally my TrueNAS boot drives.
I would probably just run CUPS under DietPi or something like that, question is, if I can't map only a single USB port, would DietPi booting, query the USB controller and disks and really really mess up my TrueNAS boot drives, potentially?
 

morganL

Captain Morgan
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I have run the 2 commands in the video and my system def supports VT-d as well as this:


xhci0@pci0:0:21:0: class=0x0c0330 card=0x096915d9 chip=0x19d08086 rev=0x11 hdr=0x00
vendor = 'Intel Corporation'
device = 'Atom Processor C3000 Series USB 3.0 xHCI Controller'
class = serial bus
subclass = USB
cap 01[70] = powerspec 2 supports D0 D3 current D0
cap 05[80] = MSI supports 8 messages, 64 bit enabled with 1 message




So if I go and mount my USB controller (which has only 3 physical ports for some reason) 2 of the ports are literally my TrueNAS boot drives.
I would probably just run CUPS under DietPi or something like that, question is, if I can't map only a single USB port, would DietPi booting, query the USB controller and disks and really really mess up my TrueNAS boot drives, potentially?

I don't think it will work to map a single USB port... it needs to be the whole USB controller. Its a limitation of bhyve and USB controllers..
 
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