Important announcement regarding FreeNAS Corral

[Jeremy Foor]

Thank you!

 

[Kris Moore]

Will this implementation of the VMs support USB pass-through? That is really the only reason I reverted back. I liked Corral and notice a decent bump in performance overall. However, I run my home automation in a VM and it uses a few USB radios that I need pass-though so I had to roll back.

I have no doubt there will be eventually USB passthrough for the underlying bhyve VM technology that Corral / FreeNAS uses, I don't have a specific timetable right now. There's a list of features on FreeBSD's bhyve wiki page in case you want to see other requested features as well. Be assured, once it does land though, we'll be pulling that in ASAP.

As for speed, 9.10.3 will also include the same FreeBSD 11 base as Corral, which should give you a nice speed-bump as well, so another thing to look forward to \o/

 

[jp83]

Does this mean encryption support will continue to be robust or are you guys walking back that feature?

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/issues-with-hole-for-log-disk.52959/#post-369356

 

[Kris Moore]

Does this mean encryption support will continue to be robust or are you guys walking back that feature?

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/issues-with-hole-for-log-disk.52959/#post-369356

The encryption support that you were using in 9.10.2 isn't going to get walked back in any way nor do we have any plans to "weaken" that feature going forward. If anything we will be open to the idea of making it better in whatever ways the technology will allow us.

 

[jpringle03]

So for those of us who have spent hours / days configuring Corral to our liking... have we just wasted our time? Without 9.10.3 being ready now Corral users have no course to easily move to 9.10.2 if we are using VMs + containers (which I've created many of)

 

[Kris Moore]

So for those of us who have spent hours / days configuring Corral to our liking... have we just wasted our time? Without 9.10.3 being ready now Corral users have no course to easily move to 9.10.2 if we are using VMs + containers (which I've created many of)

Not really. If you are on Corral and have it "dialed-in" just to your liking you are welcome to continue running it for the time being. You will be able to migrate your data back to the new "base" at a later point down the road, once you are happy with the features offered and ready to make the jump.

 

[chrisada]

So, the middleware and CLI will be no more?

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

 

[D G]

I was really looking forward to the asynchronous (is that the right term?) UI commands in Corral, where you could start a task and leave that page in the UI without causing issues. Will this make it in to 9.X? I would imagine this requires an architecture change, but is it on the roadmap?

 

[jpringle03]

Will Corral still receive updates or has all development on it been halted?

I'm just wondering if we can even expect at 10.0.5 or if its dead in the water already?

 

[danjng]

Both sad and happy to see the direction given the recent issues I've seen. That said, I might actually wait it out just a little bit if I can find workarounds.

Any chance that there will be a tool or a guide for migrating settings (export/import) from Corral to 9.10.3?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[donsev]

Thank you for the update. Will docker and containers be implemented in 9.10 eventually? New FreeNAS user with limited experience, but I've really come to like the concept of dockers.

 

[hungarianhc]

Mind kinda blown right now.

Funny. There was a bad FreeNAS release a year or so ago that made it really tough for me to recover from, and since then, I've always waited a while before upgrading to the next version of FreeNAS. I was JUST about ready to upgrade to Corral, and I didn't expect that it would essentially be canned. Wow.

I haven't seen this much software development effort go completely wasted in quite a long time. In any case, I'll still be sticking with FreeNAS. It works well for me. I feel bad for the early adopters who migrated and retooled.

 

[scurrier]

Kudos for owning the situation and improving it.

Does this mean that the asynchronous middleware concept is impossible due to limitations of the lower levels or just that this particular attempt at the middleware didn't work out?

I hope some of those features like the cli can be brought into the new roadmap.

 

[farmerpling2]

Any FS is too important to be moving to the next version unless the new version is 6-12 months old, IMHO. Same goes for O/S's also.

This is just an old enterprise rule. When your business really depends on whatever new software/hardware is newly available. It is also advisable to have a test-bed to run some reasonable tests on the newer version to make sure things will work for you and your setup.

If you really want to test things, pull drives out randomly (power and/or SATA/SAS cable or physically pull. Drop memory from 16BG to 8GB to emulate a memory stick failure (if your hardware supports it) and the list goes on.

Enterprise hardware usually has ways to do this so you can write scripts to do this in software. You should always be testing worse case and making sure there are not any regressions.

I have no doubt XI does some, maybe all of this, but any site running 25+TB should be testing their configurations to the best of their ability. At least once a year you should make sure you backups can be restored without problems.

The testing to protect your data and company from failure does not stop, because someone else says it works for them.

Make sure it works for you.

Encryption is a prime example. I do not feel comfortable using it yet. Too much hand waving to replace a failing volume, IMHO. Needs to be more automation to make it work. Maybe a script is what the doctor should order to simplify. Seems like a minimum

I know I will be using VM and virtual drives to test it pretty hard before I go to it.

 

[Antioch18]

• Expand and improve support for jails and jail-based plugins: For maximum compatibility with lighter system requirements.

Would you mind elaborating on what this means, precisely? I recall reading many forum posts by the dev team stating that jails were too complicated to configure and create plugins for which lead to a dead ecosystem thus prompting the move to Docker, which are easier to create and have a huge ecosystem. Why are jail plugins now getting improved, and what are these improvements?

I wasn't engaged with community discussions, but was the feedback that Docker-VMs are too resource heavy to run on older systems, and users wanted the option to keep the "good old" jails system?

 

[mow4cash]

I keep thinking this is an April fools joke because I can't wrap my head around it. I kept wondering why Corral was being released so soon. I thought it was too unstable to be pushed to a full Release with such a small userbase testing it and the high production environments likely staying far away from it. I love the improvements and direction taken in Corral but for me it feels like Beta on a good day but soon to be stable. I'll still take Corral over 9.10.2 . I would hate to see 9.10.3 lose any of the improvements made in Corral. I can't being to imagine what the Devs are going through after all the work they put into Corral. It was no easy task for me to make the switch to Corral.

I'm sure the team will figure this all out and have a stable release with all the goodies at some point. Nothing ventured nothing earned.

 

[maydo]

I'm a lil confused right now, I'm on FreeNAS 10 since betas and went thru all nightlies.

After the release in March, we decide to migrate our production data to FreeNAS corral, so for now 90% of migration is completed.
and the current 10.0.4 is up and running fine on my end.
Spent many hours / weeks / month, for testing, configurations, building vms + containers.

So did that mean when 9.10.3 has released, there will be a way to update/migrate everything? Except importing pools.
incl. config. or did we have to build a new configuration? Rebuilding vms + containers, configuration?

 

[vikozo6]

Hello
sad News, like @maydo i have installed FreeNAS 10 on new Hardware in December/January and done all update and Upgrades.
I also spend many hours to get it running.
I do use a couple of Docker which mostly works fine, and have moved lots of data to the new Shares.
I still update all the nightly build. but - what should I do now in the future?
have a nice day
vinc

 

[mrbrax]

So the plan is to enable NFS as the default container -> storage mapping, with an "experimental" option for 9pfs (for the brave). We are investigating another method as well though, that we will talk more about later. (assuming it pans out)

Thank god, Plex pretty much stopped responding when a library scan was in progress, and single page loads took upwards of 10 seconds.
But i suppose it's not enabled yet, then?

 

[Tyrannus]

Going to edit this for more clarity:

So if Kris is to be believed, SU1 is coming still ala "for the next stable and soon-to-be-released FreeNAS Corral."?

Do we have a timeframe? If this is going to be a long time, will 9.10-SU3 or SU4 have a downgrade option if you have say, stripped Corral of any "Corral" specific features like Docker containers or VMs?

I'd like to retain my existing NFS and SMB shares and AD bindings if possible much like I did going from 9.10 to Corral. A welcome option would be to be able to downgrade and retain settings like those if possible - it may make transitioning back easier for those of us who took a gamble on a non-enterprise instance when things were marked as "RELEASE."