The future of FreeNAS 9

[Kris Moore]

Folks,

Over the past week I’ve been asked by many of you (some on the forums, some through other means) what our intentions at iXsystems are around the existing FreeNAS product. We did have language in our initial Corral press release around this, but I wanted to take a moment to dispel any concerns and clarify what the plan is going forward. We’ve recently updated our FAQ to address this concern.

For those who are running Corral and loving it, rock-on! But for those who are die-hard 9.10 fans we want to re-iterate that FreeNAS isn’t going away. To the contrary, we already have planned updates in the works for 9.10.3 and 9.10.4 which will bring some exciting new changes. Some of the notable ones in development include:

• Support for Minio S3 Buckets: Host your own S3 compatible instance locally.
  
  
• Enhanced reporting service support: As part of our longer-term strategy of integrating Consul, Nomad, and others we’ve added initial support for consul-alerts for UI notifications. This allows you to get notifications via Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, and a variety of other platforms.
  
  
• VM support with Bhyve: Recently merged into the nightlies in time for 9.10.3 is support for running vms via the UI. This will replace the legacy VirtualBox plugin with a “native” solution, suitable for running Windows, Linux, and more.
  
  
• Replacing legacy Warden backed jails/plugins with iocage: While jails are one of the coolest things of 9.x, we know they can be difficult to create and maintain. Part of this effort is to standardize on the well-supported iocage jail management system, which also includes a much improved method of creating plugins.
  
  
• A revamped UI based upon Angular: The UI of FreeNAS is a tad aged and work has already begun to replace it with a snazzy new Angular-based UI. Another UI you may say? Well, no worries. It is being developed alongside the existing UI, meaning you can choose to log into the new or old UI with just a click. You can demo the early PoC of this UI in the nightlies today.

I’ll try to keep you posted about these enhancements as they land in the nightlies and release. In the meantime, you can follow along on the bug tracker or GitHub repos. Thanks again and we at iX appreciate your continued usage of FreeNAS and the new FreeNAS Corral.

 

[m0nkey_]

Do you have a target release date for 9.10.3?

 

[melloa]

I'm glad to hear that, or should I say: I should have read the announcement.

I'm a die-hard fan of FreeNAS and 9.10 is the stable build for me. I have been testing Corral (!) and was/am impressed with the new functions and GUI. Application development is trick. Devs (I had to learn not to do that) love to implement new things and that causes delays in project, unnecessary bugs, etc.

Great job on Corral and good to know that 9.10.3 is coming!

 

[HardDrv00]

Thanks for the update regarding FreeNAS 9's future.

• Replacing legacy Warden backed jails/plugins with iocage: While jails are one of the coolest things of 9.x, we know they can be difficult to create and maintain. Part of this effort is to standardize on the well-supported iocage jail management system, which also includes a much improved method of creating plugins.

While reading that more effort will be put into jails within FreeNAS 9 reminded me of a mention that FreeNAS Corral (at the time 10) would eventually have jails. This was almost two years ago now:

http://www.freenas.org/blog/freenas-10-a-developers-perspective/

...
This has by no means been a complete overview of all of the various cool technologies we are bringing to FreeNAS 10 (I did not even have the opportunity to talk about the future of plugins in the form of AppCafe, or bhyve Virtual Machine support, or the new iocage based jail infrastructure, or S3 compatible object storage, or or or – so many other things!), but I hope that it has given you at least some insight into the very early days of FreeNAS 10’s development process and where to get the bits, in both source and binary form. We are very excited by FreeNAS 10 as well as having a lot of fun working on it – we hope you can join us!

– Jordan

Is there any intent of bringing the FN9 iocage development to FreeNAS Corral? I currently am still running FN9.10 and plan to do so for awhile. If iocage would eventually make it to FreeNAS Corral then time spent with iocage in FN9.10 would not go to waste.

 

[cobrakiller58]

a section in the one week progress report of corral comments on this.

*snip*
The day that the new replacement for the warden eventually makes it into FreeNAS 9.10.3 (we think), we can simply copy over the relevant bits, slap a coat of paint on them in the form of middleware and CLI support, and boom, there's the old "very low overhead" thing back but compatible with FreeNAS 9's future direction (9 users have already probably noticed a lot of their jails related tickets being pushed forward with references to "a jails rewrite" - that's this) and everyone is happy again. That's what I meant when I said earlier that everything was open to negotiation, even though many things have changed.

More change is coming, and I'm very proud of what we've all accomplished here so far, bugs and all. Now alI we ask for is the community's help in getting Corral polished to a high gloss, so everyone can run it! Please keep those tickets coming, and please keep installing and testing it so that you can file tickets. Every ticket you find and we fix (or some other volunteer does, why not?) will make the end-result just that much better!

- Jordan
for the FreeNAS Dev Team

 

[Kris Moore]

Do you have a target release date for 9.10.3?

Looking at around mid-April, so 4 weeks~

 

[Kris Moore]

Woke up this morning and realized that I missed a few extra things:

• FreeBSD 11: If you are currently running the nightlies you'll notice this switch was already made over a month ago (Or perhaps you didn't, we are sneaky that way)
  
  
• AD Service Monitoring: AD users for a long while now have noticed issues where if the connection to the DC goes down, AD doesn't restart. 9.10.3 includes monitoring which will attempt to re-establish connection with the DC periodically if that happens.
  
  
• Enhanced service states: Instead of just a single ON/OFF slider, 9.10.3 breaks services down into enabled/disabled and running/stopped. This may seem trivial, but it does let us know if a service has crashed for alerting purposes.
  
  
• Python3: Not so much a user-facing change, but important for us dev-types who need to stay on top of current technology.

If you are curious which features are landing when, the nightlies (which will become 9.10.3) already have FreeBSD 11, VM Support, Experimental UI, AD service Monitoring, Enhanced Service States, Python3, and initial backend commits for Minio (s3) / Enhanced Alerts / iocage. Stay tuned, more as it happens!

 

[diedrichg]

I'm using 9.10.x and will probably continue to use it for another six months or so while the Corral issues settle down. As a 9.10 user, I really appreciate the continued support but one question comes to mind...

Why are you splitting your development resources across two very different appliances? Shouldn't 95% of your staff hours be working on Corral and the other 5% maintaining security releases for 9.10?

 

[m0nkey_]

I'm using 9.10.x and will probably continue to use it for another six months or so while the Corral issues settle down. As a 9.10 user, I really appreciate the continued support but one question comes to mind...

Why are you splitting your development resources across two very different appliances? Shouldn't 95% of your staff hours be working on Corral and the other 5% maintaining security releases for 9.10?

Maybe TrueNAS, the commercial side of iX Systems.

 

[Kris Moore]

I'm using 9.10.x and will probably continue to use it for another six months or so while the Corral issues settle down. As a 9.10 user, I really appreciate the continued support but one question comes to mind...

Why are you splitting your development resources across two very different appliances? Shouldn't 95% of your staff hours be working on Corral and the other 5% maintaining security releases for 9.10?

Well, no doubt a lot of folks at iX are working on Corral. However we realize that 9.10 has a huge user-base, and it's also the basis of our TrueNAS commercial product so it is very important to also keep giving that some love. (Turns out that developers like to eat as well)

 

[anodos]

FreeBSD 11: If you are currently running the nightlies you'll notice this switch was already made over a month ago (Or perhaps you didn't, we are sneaky that way)

In that case, shouldn't it be FreeNAS 9.11? :)

 

[Kris Moore]

In that case, shouldn't it be FreeNAS 9.11? :)

IKR? For some reason that version number doesn't sound super-pleasing to our ears. We will stick with 9.10.3 / 9.10.4 at least for the time being.

 

[m0nkey_]

IKR? For some reason that version number doesn't sound super-pleasing to our ears. We will stick with 9.10.3 / 9.10.4 at least for the time being.

Why not FreeNAS Classic? :D

 

[Kris Moore]

Why not FreeNAS Classic? :D

That's not a bad idea, maybe drop the number entirely, replace with FreeNAS <InsertTrendyCodenameHere>?

 

[Bostjan]

I think you made a lot of confusion.

1) Why you haven’t stayed with name FreeNAS 10? (ok, you told us why, but sill).

2) Till now you just had to say that you are running FreeNAS, now you will have to say FreeNAS Corral. Do you have to say FreeNAS Corral? I believe to say just FreeNAS is not enough. :(

3) What is the next version of Corral? Is it Corral 2? Or FreeNAS [newName]?

4) You could just skip FreeNAS 10 and call it FreeNAS 11. Hm, where did I hear about skipping the version number? :)

5) Kris, in your two posts here you made a looooong list of what is coming to FreeNAS 9.x. What will be the differences between 9.x and Corral? Doesn’t Corral already have all this?

6) Now you will develop and support two versions (totally different) of FreeNAS?

7) Please don’t make more confusion.

 

[Bostjan]

Why are jails no longer used in Corral? For non-expert this is problem.

Why are jails better than VMs? When you create a VM in processor you reserve a core. If you have 4 core system you run out of cores pretty fast. If you have jails you can have “as many jails” you want.

This is especially useful when you use jails now and then. In VM (as long VM is running) you have one core less at your disposal. That is 100% of power of that core.

Please tell me this thinking is wrong and that you can run more than 4 VM in 4 core system.

 

[William Grzybowski]

Why are jails no longer used in Corral? For non-expert this is problem.

Why are jails better than VMs? When you create a VM in processor you reserve a core. If you have 4 core system you run out of cores pretty fast. If you have jails you can have “as many jails” you want.

This is especially useful when you use jails now and then. In VM (as long VM is running) you have one core less at your disposal. That is 100% of power of that core.

Please tell me this thinking is wrong and that you can run more than 4 VM in 4 core system.

Thats not entirely true. A CPU core does not get pinned to VM unless you really want it to. You can have as many VMs as you want. It will use more CPU for sure, because it has a whole new OS to handle but does not mean it can't be shared.
Now speaking of memory, yes it will use a lot more memory too.

Why jails are not in Corral? Good question. I guess people do not felt it was needed and you could run them within a VM. That might _change_ in the future.

 

[William Grzybowski]

I think you made a lot of confusion.

1) Why you haven’t stayed with name FreeNAS 10? (ok, you told us why, but sill).

2) Till now you just had to say that you are running FreeNAS, now you will have to say FreeNAS Corral. Do you have to say FreeNAS Corral? I believe to say just FreeNAS is not enough. :(

3) What is the next version of Corral? Is it Corral 2? Or FreeNAS [newName]?

4) You could just skip FreeNAS 10 and call it FreeNAS 11. Hm, where did I hear about skipping the version number? :)

5) Kris, in your two posts here you made a looooong list of what is coming to FreeNAS 9.x. What will be the differences between 9.x and Corral? Doesn’t Corral already have all this?

6) Now you will develop and support two versions (totally different) of FreeNAS?

7) Please don’t make more confusion.

2) You can say just "Corral" ;)

3) Currently its Corral 10, so you can probably expect Corral 10.1, Corral 11, etc.

4) Indeed!

6) We still have thousands of 9.x users that are not thinking about a major upgrade or not do want to change. While that remains true we will keep supporting it and adding new features.

 

[Bostjan]

2) You can say just "Corral" ;)

3) Currently its Corral 10, so you can probably expect Corral 10.1, Corral 11, etc.

4) Indeed!

6) We still have thousands of 9.x users that are not thinking about a major upgrade or not do want to change. While that remains true we will keep supporting it and adding new features.

So in a nutshell you are ditching the name (brand) FreeNAS … when people will just say Corral and later on Corral 10.1, Corral 11

 

[William Grzybowski]

So in a nutshell you are ditching the name (brand) FreeNAS … when people will just say Corral and later on Corral 10.1, Corral 11

Well, I did not say that. But saying just Corral makes it shorter.
I am also not saying it will never happen ;)