I looks forward to Tom's video on how the zraid expansion works and any caveats with it. This is big dor homelabbers like me. It can be a fiscall challenge to expand a zpool like it is now.
they made the absolute worst UI possible for k8s they put zero effort into usability and it would have been 100% more usable with raw deployment manifests. ix true charts was also a nightmare.
Makes sense to move off k3s on scale. Most aren’t deploying multiple truenas scale nodes in their home lab for a k3s cluster I would assume. Either way I like the move in some aspects. I’ve had a great experience with scale apps so far though. Plex w GPU transcoding, Nextcloud,warden,cloud flaredns, and about close to a dozen more. Will be fun to redeploy it all again for a slight redesign on some apps.
About time. K3s is not the right tool for this particular job and it causes me issues with power saving states never engaging because of kube's internal furniture churn.
From my reading there is no true alternative to gluster. I feel like ceph is the onlu similar but more complicated alternative people are talking about.
Is TrueNAS doing too much these days? Virtualization, containers, all the different sync options baked-in. Don't get me wrong, I benefit from the convenience myself. But at what point do we start asking "What's the security blast radius with all this same shit running on my storage system?". If it doesn't exist already (I am a CORE user), I think we almost need an equivalent to Windows Server Core for TrueNAS. An installation option with just the bare minimum storage packages/software/features, and then users elect into what extra code they install via a package system. Not unlike pfsense in a way, I suppose.
I think maybe ix is trying to target hyper convergence for users who need something in the middle between full blown SANs attached to massive clusters and small NAS systems like Synology.
I agree with this. A NAS should really be focused on being a NAS and being as lean, mean, fast and stable as possible. If you want jails and plugins, those should be happening elsewhere, not on the storage appliance.
@@Bryan1342I agree, but the NAS portion works great already. I don't use app portion of scale except rsync. But I understand why they would want to try to keep customers on their product for everything.
Seems they're trying to compete with Unraid. I am TrueNAS Core myself and love the speed and stability it offers but they haven't made much updates to it in awhile.
@@Bryan1342 maybe that's the ideal situation, but as someone who uses truenas at home it's just so much more practical to have everything on the same machine. I don't really have the space or budget for another machine, and I'm not exactly running a server farm here, just the few apps that I need for my own use.
ZFS expansion is going to be great for those that don't want to break the bank getting all the space they anticipate needing at once. The ability to expand your pool with more hardware later is a welcoming feature.
A great summary on the latest updates to Scale. I am a Core home user running PC backups, Plex, and Tailscale. I really like the stability of Core, but Scale is starting to look really good. It is "good trouble " to have 2 great options from iXsystems. 😊
How come they can add all these complicated features yet they cannot even get drives to spin down when they are set to do so after 120 minutes of non-use. I have tried a fresh install with no apps, dataset on the boot pool and other minor tweaks per their instruction and still the drives never spin down. Then they tell you it is not officially supported. It's built into the OS as a feature for cryin out loud. I would like to leave my server on but I live in a high cost/kWh area and do not use it enough. So, I am relegated to turning it on and off again once every two weeks or so. Just pathetic.
As someone who is still really new to this and just wiped my TrueNAS Scale instance because I wasn’t happy with the performance following the update to Dragonscale, I’m kind of disappointed. I’ve read that TrueCharts has been divisive, but it seems like there’s a lot of complexity to get things Docker running in TrueNAS Scale. It seems like there’s a steep learning curve to knowing what to modify in a Compose script.
im not sure about the docker/kubernetes thing tbh i feel like there is a lot of confusion in the industry around containers and how they run but making the switch that way around feels crazy k8s manifests/a helm chart can do pretty much everything (i think it is actually everything but leaving room for there to be some obscure thing ive missed) that a docker-compose file can do, and its not that difficult a conversion (i havent personally tried it but there is a tool "Kompose" that claims to be able to do it for you) that is not the case the other way around, there are tons of things that k8s can do that docker-compose cant, ofc i get that can make things more complicated for users who dont want it but imo the solution there is to provide a simpler interface that hides the stuff they dont want to see, rather than to remove support for all of that functionality docker-compose is nice and convenient for development environments but even though i have used it for a couple of production deploys before i learnt any better it doesnt really feel like its designed for it
GlusterFS failed to pass validation for iX (or something tied to it and k8s) as a project apparently, so SCALE's intent/ability to scale kinda died as well, or got put on the back burner. Offing k3s for docker makes sense, but now impacts users, like myself that were deep into custom charts, like TrueCharts.
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS it's a shame, it initially was wat got me excited about Truenas. Now that I use it I realize it's great for other reasons as well so I'll keep using it. Still hope they'll do it in the future
@@RoccoWocco No news on a replacement that I've seen. The whole TrueCommand feature that used GlusterFS has no alternative storage implementation, so it's dead in the water at least for now. Personally, I'm rethinking my NAS/apps setup now. Given that they opted to rip out k3s and Helm Charts support that I was using, it's time to consider doing the same back to TrueNAS and look at other options. Probably not going to replace TrueNAS for storage, but good to keep tabs on things. KubeApps is probably what I'm doing, probably Talos for a k8s OS. Will probably need to get new hardware as my NAS was my big everything box and it's over a decade old for the core hardware.
Docker is well known, well documented, popular and everywhere. Not saying podman wouldn't be good, but they already tried the boutique route and are switching.
Ditched the turnkey software (ugreen OS) for truenas after hearing they'll support raidz expansion! @Lawrence Systems I wonder though if this will also allow for raidz changes. E.g. adding a drive and going from raidz1 to raidz2 in that pool... any idea if thats coming?
Thanks for all the informative content. How can I add/install a GPU to my TrueNAS Scale installation (non-virtualized) and ensure apps can use it e.g. Photo Prism, Nextcloud, etc.
I'm an IT infrastructure engineer, and I have a pretty extensive homelab. I really don't get the use case for a NAS running applications, whether it be in containers, jails or VMs. That said, going from Kubernetes to docker is a backward move, and using docker-compose for any kind of production purpose is asinine. Kubernetes exists because using Docker / compose in production situations is a horrific, unmanageable mess. I don't need my NAS to also be a media server; if I need one of those, I'll either deploy it to one of my k8s clusters (I run both k3s and talos) or spin up a VM for it in my hypervisor, and use my NAS to provide storage. What I would rather see is Truenas adding block-storage capabilities as a base capacity; something like what EBS or Minio provide. What really excites me is HCI
well, with the D!CK move that Broadcom did with esxi, there goes that. Hyper-V legit can be expensive from a software point of view. Yes, there is Proxmox but maybe some just dont want to bother for a handful of workloads on prem as my company cant stomach ongoing opex. So I dunno, Im ok with running a few small util type vms. I had a call with TrueNAS looking at their physical options. The guy told me that scale WILL be the defactor standard at some point in the future. 5-7 years out.
Can anybody point me to the bridge interface in Truenas scale electric eel? How about having 2 nics - 2 vlans? One nic and vlan to serve gui and smbs shares and other nic and vlan to serve Plex clients. Thanks in advance.
Is it simple to upgrade from v23 to v24? I’m not really sure what I’ll be gaining. On the other hand, I’ve seen first hand problems from skipping versions. Things like upgrade scripts might only be written for going from v23 to v24, and not v23 to v25 , for example!
Noob here. Could you do a video on how to install Plex on Dragonfish 24.04.1.1? I just upgraded from Core and am completely lost on how to configure the app to install.
Im new to the system. Can you point me to a video on how to set it up from the start? Im just using it for plex and media storage only, and I have a 2tb nvme to use for metadata. I dont want to give no one access to my server, but I do want to connect to it from outside my network while sharing plex Media with whoever.
I am happy the ZFS expansion is coming. I based my RAIDZ decision a year ago on the promises of this future possibility, opting for a five disk RAIDZ2 instead of RAIDZ1. It's far from filled so far, so I'll wait, but I love the fact that it will be possible to expand the ZFS with another disk once needed.
If I am new to NAS systems, do you recommend Unraid or TrueNas? (not opposed to experimenting & frustration) I am using the Ugreen 6 Bay NAS. Also will be using docker/k8 to run jellyfin, plex and some kind of photo management app amongst other things
the zfs expansion is what I'm really looking forward too. My media server is getting kinda full, sitting around 70%, would love to be able to expand it easily
Will it be possible to later upgrade to electric eel and make useof ZFS expansion then? Or do you have to start with a version that has ZFS expansion when you build your storage pool to enjoy the benefits of ZFS expansion?
Hello, watching a ton of your videos on truenas and they are great. I started my own home server nas but running into issues with my connected external drive pools since I don't have room for internal storage. When I reboot the system or loss power, upon restart truenas does not reconnect the drives as setup but recognizing them as unassigned drives. Any tips or video you did that could help please? Thank you
I'm going to assume that Core isn't getting this ZFS expansion ability? If that's the case, is it possible to "upgrade" from Core to Scale without reinstalling from scratch?
I don't know why they went from kube to docker. Podman can create pods from kube manifests and generate kube manifests from running pods and has a much better dev experience imo. Plus I think it has a nicer integration with systemd thanks to quadlet and hirte (although I think its called BlueChi now?). Anyway, docker is old tech and I don't know why anyone would use docker-compose over kube manifests.
While Podman has some nice features, Docker Compose is much simpler IME especially when it comes to multi-container apps. There are like 5 ways to make an auto-starting Podman stack, whereas for Docker it's pretty much just `docker-compose up -d`. I use Podman but it took awhile to get my head around all the options available and their differences. Whatever the case, I wouldn't call Docker "old tech" - it's not the latest and greatest but it's not exactly a dinosaur.
They drop the native k3s support ( running this in sandboxes is really not production for ) and so killing all alternative apps like TrueCharts repo. I think they will lose a lot of homelab users. Anyway, personnaly, I'm done with Truenas
TrueCharts itself was scaring away tons of homelab users. Just allowing people to run Docker Compose and maybe providing some templating is going to be way easier in the long run. Just look at how successful Unraid has been in the homelab space with community driven Docker based applications
@@jncanches They're not. If you want to continue to run k3s, you can, in a sandbox. It's not really a good usage of resources on IX's side to maintain 2 completely different application ecosystems though
Sandbox and production seems not really a good idea. I will go for a more robust way like Proxmox + Talos for example and perhaps keep Truenas only for NAS functionalities. Not decided yet
Should of mentioned the Jails aspect. Using Jailmaker to create a Docker Linux Jail works pretty awesome right now.
I looks forward to Tom's video on how the zraid expansion works and any caveats with it. This is big dor homelabbers like me. It can be a fiscall challenge to expand a zpool like it is now.
iX made a valiant effort trying to put a simple GUI on top of K8s, but I’m glad they’re throwing in the towel.
they made the absolute worst UI possible for k8s they put zero effort into usability and it would have been 100% more usable with raw deployment manifests. ix true charts was also a nightmare.
😂😂😂😂 what effort?
Hurray for docker compose. K3s on truenas was a mistake.
Makes sense to move off k3s on scale. Most aren’t deploying multiple truenas scale nodes in their home lab for a k3s cluster I would assume. Either way I like the move in some aspects. I’ve had a great experience with scale apps so far though. Plex w GPU transcoding, Nextcloud,warden,cloud flaredns, and about close to a dozen more. Will be fun to redeploy it all again for a slight redesign on some apps.
About time. K3s is not the right tool for this particular job and it causes me issues with power saving states never engaging because of kube's internal furniture churn.
Also, I didn't see any mention of what's replacing Gluster. Is that still unknown? That was kind of a big selling point of the "SCALE" branding
From my reading there is no true alternative to gluster. I feel like ceph is the onlu similar but more complicated alternative people are talking about.
@wojtek-33 look at Linbit
Is TrueNAS doing too much these days? Virtualization, containers, all the different sync options baked-in. Don't get me wrong, I benefit from the convenience myself. But at what point do we start asking "What's the security blast radius with all this same shit running on my storage system?".
If it doesn't exist already (I am a CORE user), I think we almost need an equivalent to Windows Server Core for TrueNAS. An installation option with just the bare minimum storage packages/software/features, and then users elect into what extra code they install via a package system. Not unlike pfsense in a way, I suppose.
I think maybe ix is trying to target hyper convergence for users who need something in the middle between full blown SANs attached to massive clusters and small NAS systems like Synology.
I agree with this. A NAS should really be focused on being a NAS and being as lean, mean, fast and stable as possible. If you want jails and plugins, those should be happening elsewhere, not on the storage appliance.
@@Bryan1342I agree, but the NAS portion works great already. I don't use app portion of scale except rsync. But I understand why they would want to try to keep customers on their product for everything.
Seems they're trying to compete with Unraid. I am TrueNAS Core myself and love the speed and stability it offers but they haven't made much updates to it in awhile.
@@Bryan1342 maybe that's the ideal situation, but as someone who uses truenas at home it's just so much more practical to have everything on the same machine. I don't really have the space or budget for another machine, and I'm not exactly running a server farm here, just the few apps that I need for my own use.
ZFS expansion is going to be great for those that don't want to break the bank getting all the space they anticipate needing at once. The ability to expand your pool with more hardware later is a welcoming feature.
That's a definite for me
A great summary on the latest updates to Scale. I am a Core home user running PC backups, Plex, and Tailscale.
I really like the stability of Core, but Scale is starting to look really good.
It is "good trouble " to have 2 great options from iXsystems. 😊
Thanks for the stability info.
How come they can add all these complicated features yet they cannot even get drives to spin down when they are set to do so after 120 minutes of non-use. I have tried a fresh install with no apps, dataset on the boot pool and other minor tweaks per their instruction and still the drives never spin down. Then they tell you it is not officially supported. It's built into the OS as a feature for cryin out loud. I would like to leave my server on but I live in a high cost/kWh area and do not use it enough. So, I am relegated to turning it on and off again once every two weeks or so. Just pathetic.
Thanks, good to see the Progress. Nice Video BTW
Docker is a fantastic decision! K8s... especially at the scale of these instances (not 1000's of machines) made no sense.
As someone who is still really new to this and just wiped my TrueNAS Scale instance because I wasn’t happy with the performance following the update to Dragonscale, I’m kind of disappointed.
I’ve read that TrueCharts has been divisive, but it seems like there’s a lot of complexity to get things Docker running in TrueNAS Scale. It seems like there’s a steep learning curve to knowing what to modify in a Compose script.
im not sure about the docker/kubernetes thing tbh
i feel like there is a lot of confusion in the industry around containers and how they run but making the switch that way around feels crazy
k8s manifests/a helm chart can do pretty much everything (i think it is actually everything but leaving room for there to be some obscure thing ive missed) that a docker-compose file can do, and its not that difficult a conversion (i havent personally tried it but there is a tool "Kompose" that claims to be able to do it for you)
that is not the case the other way around, there are tons of things that k8s can do that docker-compose cant,
ofc i get that can make things more complicated for users who dont want it but imo the solution there is to provide a simpler interface that hides the stuff they dont want to see, rather than to remove support for all of that functionality
docker-compose is nice and convenient for development environments but even though i have used it for a couple of production deploys before i learnt any better it doesnt really feel like its designed for it
I always thought the idea would be to eventually have k8s clusters for the apps. I get Docker is simpler but did they just give up on clustering?
GlusterFS failed to pass validation for iX (or something tied to it and k8s) as a project apparently, so SCALE's intent/ability to scale kinda died as well, or got put on the back burner. Offing k3s for docker makes sense, but now impacts users, like myself that were deep into custom charts, like TrueCharts.
I feel like they might be moving away from clustering the apps.
@@Spice__King they are working on a new system for storage right?
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS it's a shame, it initially was wat got me excited about Truenas. Now that I use it I realize it's great for other reasons as well so I'll keep using it. Still hope they'll do it in the future
@@RoccoWocco No news on a replacement that I've seen. The whole TrueCommand feature that used GlusterFS has no alternative storage implementation, so it's dead in the water at least for now. Personally, I'm rethinking my NAS/apps setup now. Given that they opted to rip out k3s and Helm Charts support that I was using, it's time to consider doing the same back to TrueNAS and look at other options. Probably not going to replace TrueNAS for storage, but good to keep tabs on things. KubeApps is probably what I'm doing, probably Talos for a k8s OS. Will probably need to get new hardware as my NAS was my big everything box and it's over a decade old for the core hardware.
Docker? Would podman be a better choice?
Docker is well known, well documented, popular and everywhere. Not saying podman wouldn't be good, but they already tried the boutique route and are switching.
Nah, colima.
Ditched the turnkey software (ugreen OS) for truenas after hearing they'll support raidz expansion! @Lawrence Systems I wonder though if this will also allow for raidz changes. E.g. adding a drive and going from raidz1 to raidz2 in that pool... any idea if thats coming?
Thanks for all the informative content.
How can I add/install a GPU to my TrueNAS Scale installation (non-virtualized) and ensure apps can use it e.g. Photo Prism, Nextcloud, etc.
I'm an IT infrastructure engineer, and I have a pretty extensive homelab. I really don't get the use case for a NAS running applications, whether it be in containers, jails or VMs. That said, going from Kubernetes to docker is a backward move, and using docker-compose for any kind of production purpose is asinine. Kubernetes exists because using Docker / compose in production situations is a horrific, unmanageable mess.
I don't need my NAS to also be a media server; if I need one of those, I'll either deploy it to one of my k8s clusters (I run both k3s and talos) or spin up a VM for it in my hypervisor, and use my NAS to provide storage. What I would rather see is Truenas adding block-storage capabilities as a base capacity; something like what EBS or Minio provide.
What really excites me is HCI
well, with the D!CK move that Broadcom did with esxi, there goes that. Hyper-V legit can be expensive from a software point of view. Yes, there is Proxmox but maybe some just dont want to bother for a handful of workloads on prem as my company cant stomach ongoing opex. So I dunno, Im ok with running a few small util type vms. I had a call with TrueNAS looking at their physical options. The guy told me that scale WILL be the defactor standard at some point in the future. 5-7 years out.
When is the docker expected? I cannot find this readily, maybe I’m overlooking stuff
will this change make dockers as easy to install and use like in unraid.
Is there support for of e driver for Intel 10 gb network cards?
Can anybody point me to the bridge interface in Truenas scale electric eel?
How about having 2 nics - 2 vlans?
One nic and vlan to serve gui and smbs shares and other nic and vlan to serve Plex clients.
Thanks in advance.
Is it simple to upgrade from v23 to v24? I’m not really sure what I’ll be gaining.
On the other hand, I’ve seen first hand problems from skipping versions. Things like upgrade scripts might only be written for going from v23 to v24, and not v23 to v25 , for example!
Noob here. Could you do a video on how to install Plex on Dragonfish 24.04.1.1? I just upgraded from Core and am completely lost on how to configure the app to install.
Im new to the system. Can you point me to a video on how to set it up from the start? Im just using it for plex and media storage only, and I have a 2tb nvme to use for metadata. I dont want to give no one access to my server, but I do want to connect to it from outside my network while sharing plex Media with whoever.
So thats why my bridge broke
Kinda sad they go into featurefudging everywhere instead of putting the long awaited features like zfs expand and fast dedup in the stable release.
good!
I'm on Bluefish, Did I pick the wrong fish?
Keep swimming with that one as the new one is not coming until later this year
What do you recommend for Wifi security? WPA3 PSK or EAP?
the only thing i would nee scale for is apps. witch do not work
they dont?
@@lyianx I find them very reliable
Mine work fine.
@@majorgear1021 good for you. I expect a product should work out of the box. Scale never did
Meh. I don't want Scale. I want Core. Jails are much better with ZFS datasets than LXC and Docker ever could be.
Tom, your watch is not secure on your wrist 😅
Yeah, I should tighten the band a bit more.
TrueCharts leaving TrueNas is heartbreaking
Shutdown is broken.
first
system security would be appreciated on raw hardware
I am happy the ZFS expansion is coming. I based my RAIDZ decision a year ago on the promises of this future possibility, opting for a five disk RAIDZ2 instead of RAIDZ1. It's far from filled so far, so I'll wait, but I love the fact that it will be possible to expand the ZFS with another disk once needed.
If I am new to NAS systems, do you recommend Unraid or TrueNas?
(not opposed to experimenting & frustration)
I am using the Ugreen 6 Bay NAS. Also will be using docker/k8 to run jellyfin, plex and some kind of photo management app amongst other things
the zfs expansion is what I'm really looking forward too. My media server is getting kinda full, sitting around 70%, would love to be able to expand it easily
Will it be possible to later upgrade to electric eel and make useof ZFS expansion then? Or do you have to start with a version that has ZFS expansion when you build your storage pool to enjoy the benefits of ZFS expansion?
I am not sure yet, but I would imagine it's like most other ZFS upgrades and can be done in place.
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS Thank you for your insight and experience.
Hello, watching a ton of your videos on truenas and they are great. I started my own home server nas but running into issues with my connected external drive pools since I don't have room for internal storage. When I reboot the system or loss power, upon restart truenas does not reconnect the drives as setup but recognizing them as unassigned drives. Any tips or video you did that could help please? Thank you
Great video Tom
I'm going to assume that Core isn't getting this ZFS expansion ability? If that's the case, is it possible to "upgrade" from Core to Scale without reinstalling from scratch?
I'm not sure if it's coming to core, but it might be. You can't upgrade from core to scale and import your pool but not your apps.
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS Thanks Tom ! And love the shirt (I got a 568B one from your shop).
I don't know why they went from kube to docker. Podman can create pods from kube manifests and generate kube manifests from running pods and has a much better dev experience imo. Plus I think it has a nicer integration with systemd thanks to quadlet and hirte (although I think its called BlueChi now?). Anyway, docker is old tech and I don't know why anyone would use docker-compose over kube manifests.
While Podman has some nice features, Docker Compose is much simpler IME especially when it comes to multi-container apps. There are like 5 ways to make an auto-starting Podman stack, whereas for Docker it's pretty much just `docker-compose up -d`. I use Podman but it took awhile to get my head around all the options available and their differences.
Whatever the case, I wouldn't call Docker "old tech" - it's not the latest and greatest but it's not exactly a dinosaur.
They drop the native k3s support ( running this in sandboxes is really not production for ) and so killing all alternative apps like TrueCharts repo. I think they will lose a lot of homelab users. Anyway, personnaly, I'm done with Truenas
TrueCharts itself was scaring away tons of homelab users. Just allowing people to run Docker Compose and maybe providing some templating is going to be way easier in the long run. Just look at how successful Unraid has been in the homelab space with community driven Docker based applications
truecharts will lose a lot of users yeah. More users will use Truenas when they switch to Docker.
I don't understand why k3s and docker have to be exclusive in the iX philosophy...
@@jncanches They're not. If you want to continue to run k3s, you can, in a sandbox. It's not really a good usage of resources on IX's side to maintain 2 completely different application ecosystems though
Sandbox and production seems not really a good idea.
I will go for a more robust way like Proxmox + Talos for example and perhaps keep Truenas only for NAS functionalities. Not decided yet