Moving from CORE to SCALE

[jordanthompson]

I have a couple of pools that I want to consolidate into a single pool and I really want to move to Linux, so I am going to be making the plunge soon.

I (currently) plan to back everything up (in two places!), wipe my drives and do a fresh install.
Am I better starting from scratch, or running the upgrade and rebuilding my pool?

If I do an upgrade:
I have a couple of jails (a web server with nothing on it and a plex server) that I assume will get blown away as they are currently on FreeBSD and a VM running Ubuntu (that I am looking forward to turning into a jail on SCALE.)
I have a few rsync tasks that I wouldn't mind keeping, along with my (couple of) users and their UID's and GID's.
There are probably some other things that I can't think of that will (hopefully) remain intact.

If I do a new install:
There will be no bloat from the previous version
I will have to reconfigure a few things

Any suggestions/comments/recommendations?

 

[Samuel Tai]

SCALE doesn't have jails; that's a FreeBSD technology with no Linux equivalent. SCALE uses Kubernetes instead to host apps. VMs are available, but using KVM instead of bhyve. I would start over from scratch on a different box to run in parallel and not disturb my current pool.

 

[Whattteva]

I (currently) plan to back everything up (in two places!), wipe my drives and do a fresh install.
Am I better starting from scratch, or running the upgrade and rebuilding my pool?

I'm pretty sure you can just import the current pools, but since you mentioned wanting to consolidate the two pools into one, I'd imagine now would be as good time as any to do so.

If I do an upgrade:
I have a couple of jails (a web server with nothing on it and a plex server) that I assume will get blown away as they are currently on FreeBSD and a VM running Ubuntu (that I am looking forward to turning into a jail on SCALE.)

Nothing will happen to your jails. They will stay in your pools like before. However, you can't run them as jails are a FreeBSD containerization technology which does not exist in Linux. But you will still be able to access its files in the datasets as normal.

 

[sretalla]

SCALE doesn't have jails; that's a FreeBSD technology with no Linux equivalent.

LXC containers? (not yet there on SCALE, but had been discussed as an option that would come)

 

[Jip-Hop]

Or maybe you can make a 'jail' with systemd-nspawn? Since systemd-nspawn is already included with SCALE (although not officially supported). I made a helper script to create a jail. Warning: still experimental!

 

[rvassar]

Been pondering this myself. Now that ESX 6.x is EOL, I've moved my homelab stuff off to Proxmox. I pared TrueNAS CORE down to two jails. One of which is easy to recreate either in a Linux VM, or on Scale, the other.... Plex, which I haven't started looking for a solution for.

Amusingly... You could probably spin up FreeBSD in a VM, and export/import the jails there.

 

[mistermanko]

Plex, which I haven't started looking for a solution for.

Plex works wonderfully on SCALE, particularly the Truecharts version. Vms are also very stable. I switched from core and am pretty happy. Had roughly 10 jails, that I all either recreated in a Debian VM as Docker host or in Truecharts apps. Nextcloud was a pain in the a... but finally managed to bring that back to.

 

[danb35]

Plex, which I haven't started looking for a solution for.

Plex runs just fine in a SCALE app.

 

[rvassar]

Plex runs just fine in a SCALE app.

I'm sure it does. But I need to figure out Plex pass, networking, HD Home Run, etc... I've allowed things to get a bit too complicated, and I'm inclined to let the NAS just be a NAS.

Amusingly, Proxmox let me build a cluster between my large VM host, and a cheap $9 eBay laptop with an i5-mobile & 8Gb of memory. I parked a quorum vote on a Raspberry Pi I keep running 24x7, using Corosync. This nets me the ability to migrate running VM's back and forth, and shed the kWh load of the second server when it's not needed.

 

[danb35]

I'm inclined to let the NAS just be a NAS.

There's definitely something to be said for that position. My (somewhat contrary) position is that it makes sense to run apps that are going to be using data on the NAS extensively, on the NAS. Particularly when, in my case, the NAS is arguably more capable than any of my three main Proxmox hosts (OK, the NAS has dual E5-2670s vs their dual E5-2680v2s, but 128 GB of RAM vs. 80 GB+/-). Sure, the NAS is designed to share that data, but this removes a number of steps in the apps' access to that data. But there are pros and cons to just about any arrangement.

 

[Whattteva]

Been pondering this myself. Now that ESX 6.x is EOL, I've moved my homelab stuff off to Proxmox. I pared TrueNAS CORE down to two jails. One of which is easy to recreate either in a Linux VM, or on Scale, the other.... Plex, which I haven't started looking for a solution for.

Amusingly... You could probably spin up FreeBSD in a VM, and export/import the jails there.

This is what I do now. Jail management is just so much better on a vanilla FreeBSD with BastilleBSD. And the Jellyfin (I hate Plex) unofficial port runs quite nicely also.