This video is jam packed with information. I was aware of the operating system switch but the container and virtualization differences are equally important. Of course for many applications performance is paramount, as is having a mature system that has been field tested for many generations vs a system that's just out of the gate and still in early development. For bleeding edge aficionados Scale is king whereas performance and stability favor Core.
Dropping by to say that if you haven't taken the time to upgrade to TrueNAS Scale yet, take the down-time and DO IT! All of my weird performance quirks and suddenly fixed.
This is super timely video! I’ve just started looking at TrueNAS. I had looked at FreeNAS years ago but went with unraid as I had different sized drives and wanted to run my gaming PC as a VM. That’s not the case anymore so now im considering shifting to TrueNAS. I still want to run a VM on there and some containers. Mainly Plex and HooBs and a handful of other containers. So debating if it’s worth moving to TrueNAS or just rebuilding my Unraid. This video has given me a great over view of “free” TrueNAS options.
Given that I am on a micro budget for my home lab. I run an esx box and Truenas box. When I started to outgrow my ESX box, i decided to try moving a couple of VM's over to the virtual machine component of Truenas to try it out. And found that it is certainly no where near as feature rich as ESX. And basically concluded its provisional at best. But that said, I found it more than adequate to handle the couple light tasks I ported to it. And its performance was actually better than I expected too. It has a long way to go to be a replacement for my ESX box even for my use case, but it certainly was a nice addition to my setup. And even though I have now upgraded my ESX box to be quite a bit more powerful and have much more ram ect, I have not bothered moving the VM's back from Truenas KVM to it. Even though the process is not all that hard to do. I find they are just fine running where they are. My conclusion is Truenas KVM works just fine if your needs for it are modest and you just want to throw up a windows vm for a game server or something. Or in my case I use it for a torrent downloader and another vm for a private game server. Neither really need a lot of CPU or ram or any special configuration. So for this its just fine. But I can see where its limitations would quickly mount up if I decided to move everything over to it.
Two questions: 1) Are you able to remove a gluster brick from a gluster volume? I've tried to do that before with "normal" Gluster, and it didn't seem like that there was really a way to do that? 2) What kind of a performance hit are we talking about by moving to TrueNAS Scale from TrueNAS Core? 10%? 20%? 30%?
Truenas core works just fine on my 11th gen i3 system but upgrading to scale or trying to install scale just goes pear-shaped. And i have believed for maaaany years that linux has way better hw support than BSD.
Finally some one that explain exactly what is TrueNAS Scale. Is incredible how many UA-camrs spread the wrong information just to get some click making videos on a new product. 🤘🤘🤘🤘 Moreover containers are still less secure and less mature than Jails. If you care about the security of your system and data is really not good idea using TrueNAS scale for many month to comme. Maybe in Q3 2022 is the right moment to think about a mgration.
I really want to learn gluster fs it sounds really interesting As a home user who's no expert I felt truenas scale is probably a little more newb friendly. Setting up the acl's seemed easier, there's broader hardware support (specifically my realtek nic). The apps are cool but it does feel like scale is a little more resource hungry. Or maybe I'm just loading too many apps at once on an old system.
Good work again as ever Tom. Core is downloading now and I think I'll wipe and rebuild my lab then upgrade my production system to Core in a couple of months.
Gluster seems a lot like CEPH. I run a 3 node (PCs) proxmox cluster using off the shelf hardware. Each node's storage (20TB HDD and 500GB SSD) are mirrored across the 3 nodes using the built-in CEPH module. If a PC/HDD/SSD goes down, I have 2 more PCs with the same identical data in their storage. The VM's are running with High Availability so if a node goes down, the VM automatically starts on the 2nd node. Each node has 3 Network cards, 1 for the office network which accesses the VMs, 1 for the Proxmox VM Clustering operations and 1 for the CEPH Storage mirroring operations.
Hey Tom - have you tested the performance hit going to scale? The last video I saw where you talked about that; you showed some screen shots of a forum post where the loss in performance was dramatically worse. Any update on that?
Still not performing as well with Scale. Here is the forum post www.truenas.com/community/threads/22-02-release-performance-regressions.99236/#post-684643
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS the performance of scale is horrendous! Cannot see how this kind of performance is anywhere acceptable for a released product. Its literally 4 times slower than Core !
Just wanted to point out a point that i think you missed on. TrueNAS Scale only supports SMB with "Scaled-Out ZFS" using Gluster. This is currently a major limitation for me right now. pNFS 4.1 would have made more sense for "Scaled-Out ZFS" using Gluster dont know why they didnt do this first?
The scaling out feature of TrueNas Scale already exists out there in a mature, tried-and-true, open source product called CEPH. If one is looking for a scaling-out-enabled open source system, s/he need not bother with TrueNas Scale, and instead, go straight to CEPH.
Would love to see an updated video on why you prefer xcp-ng over proxmox (et al). Browsed your many videos and they are a bit aged, so not sure how relevant the comparisons are.
So, we will, eventually, be able to use commodity hardware to build individual storage nodes in, for example, 3U 12 drive servers, then pull those together into a logically central interface through multiple control nodes that will be both redundant and load balanced, to get petabytes of software defined storage? Sounds like high end enterprise storage at a lot lower cost. I like that idea.
9:29 Anyone use PFsense/OPNsense which based on freebsd? And, truenas core also use freebsd. Is the Realtek Ethernet performance issue also occure in Truenas core?
5:20 DE-BIAN xD Never heard DEB-IAN pronounced like that. Sorry. I'm excited to learn TrueNAS Scale, I didn't like FreeBSD's lack of NFS config options, so I just run my pool on Proxmox.
Please do an updated performance video between Core and Scale since the new updates might have changed the results. It's the only thing I want to know before making the switch.
As this video is 9 month old.. Is there any chance to see a video on setting up glusterfs with truenas scale? Is it a best practise to setup a singe truenas scale with trueCommand to build a one node glusterfs - just in case you want to expand in a year or so? If you setup glusterfs later, you have to move all your data - glusterfs will wipe all you hdds
Thank you gor these gems of videos before doing sny research (i know i know) i went out bought a Synology DS1621+ added 64GB of ram 10GB nic and 6x18TB Exos drives. But i a made a Cardinal Sin 🤦♂️went built the arrey i chose JBOD so i had more storage available. Now (months later) i have zero protection and 56TB of data so plan is build in the Jonsbo N3 load up 8x22TB Drive's 2x2TB Nvme drives 64GB of ram it'll be running on a Amd Ryzen 5700G on the Asus Strix x570 it'll only need 1 VM, Plan is get the raid array on True Nas Raid 5 at least copy over all data from the Synology then wipe the Synology reset rebuild the array with Raid 5 sonit can be a backup target for the new True Nas Server.
I just "upgraded" to TrueNAS Scale yesterday following your guide from a few months ago. I only ran into one configuration issue with my smb shares. ( There was an option on them that was not available on Linux, deleted it and moved on.) I am much more familiar with Linux was the reason. Next, I need PFSense to make a Linux version.
@@kirle5455 It's not as well built as PFSense is. And the PF firewall in BSD is much better than IPCHAINS in Linux. The main development coordinator also decides to remove functionality when he determines that it's a security problem even thought it's provided by a package that doesn't have to be installed. He did that with UPNP functionality. So I've given up on IPFire for home use anyway.
Just one quick question about the virtualization on TrNa-Sc. When I checked, I saw that it used KVM for virtualization, but I was wondering if that was all. I only need virt/con for one(1) Win10 instance, which I do on a regular Linux workstation which runs the KVM/QEMU/Virt-Manager stack - and then send it out with X2Go to any screen I want. Would I still be able to install this stack on TrNa-Sc?
I just installed core on the server at work. Was thinking of going with scale, still might test it, but I only have shares for the couple windows 10 PCs that connect to it for storage.
I've been wondering about Scale for some time. What is the specific advantage of being able to use docker or k8s? virtual machine? container? So what? If you can access data and files as a NAS and can monitor it and it is stable, isn't that necessary and sufficient? What can you do by moving to The Scale?
If I want to setup a 10G home NAS...I'm assuming TrueNAS Core should be ideal for that? I was thinking of installing ProxMox and then add TruNAS Core as a VM and pass the card through...probably a SFP+ Mellanox card.
Very interesting .... I am running OMV with ZFS due to TrueNAS shortcomings for my home setup (Docker, etc) TrueNAS Scale looks like it addresses the issues. I do like OMV's ACL manager. I haven't seen this in TrueNas core yet though. I virtualised my OMV on XCP-NG. I would likely do the same with TrueNAS core. Mainly for snapshots and backups.
@@vaughngx4 that video is a broad over generalization and doesn't apply to all setups. For example, none of what he said applies to me since I'm passing the whole HBA card through to the VM. Likewise, I don't think it applies to many home users at all if they're passing the drives directly to the VM. The only thing the video talks about is using ZFS on top of a virtualized disk.
Major difference, Unix kernel vice Linux kernel. For me, it Scale does t use bhyve for its hypervisor, major thing for me. Not much else that’s different really hits my radar as they both still use ZFS and the network stack benefits of FreeBSD isn’t needed for me in my NAS. I like your take on containers/jails. The compute and data should be separate so the compute is ephemeral and doesn’t matter.
I use ESXi for all my virtual machines (NFS and iSCSI) and TrueNAS only for file storage/sharing/etc in my home network. Would Scale give me any benefits over Core at all?
I have the same plans. Running VMware ESXi and with vSphere and runt TrueNAS Scale as a VM since it's Debian based and I'm used to that. Also wanted to install some small Debian servers aswell as VMs on that ESXi server. Like AD and LDAP
Time have passed since this very old and outdated video and lots of changes and fixes has been done on TrueNAS Scale! Performance have been increased etc.
Still, Truenas has a gap on scaling the storage capacity incrementally. To add storage capacity later, without loosing/move data, and keep a basic protection you have no solution.
How about TrueNAS Scale vs TrueNAS Core for RealTek LAN? FreeBSD people tell you to avoid Realtek LAN (i.e. pfSense community) but the Linux community never mentions a problem with Realtek LAN.
I am still looking for that video where you said you removed a live running mobo from a TrueNAS Enterprise System. I do not see it linked currently 2023-12-06.
Dear Tom, I would’ve liked if can hire your company to help us with our IT predicament, but unfortunately we’re located in Eastern Europe and I fear your professional reach isn’t that wide. However, I find your content very educational and enlightening, thus I am pushing our ITs to broaden their horizons outside MS $h1t they’re used to. Thanks for your effort!!!
Interesting question. I have a migrated freenas and a windows server. The server runs milestone for my camera system.. With The new Scale. Could I virtualize to allow it to run the windows milestone and allow it to see the video card that is used for graphics rendering? or would that be a bad idea with a nas? otherwise its mainly a file storage device for me.. but if I could then I could actually decomission the server :P
I'm curious is their intention to continue making both Core and Scale or is one the future of the project? - Seems like a lot of work to maintain both.
i am trying to connect and configure UPS on my truenas scale box but I only get ttyl 0 and 1 and uhid. how can I configure the ups, it is connected through USB and it is the SMT750 ups, I keep getting alerts that the communication to the UPS is lost. all other settings are right just identifying the right USB, I used /dev/usb/hiddev0 which is where the ups is supposed to be.
That was my concern, It's why I went with core, although I prefer the debian based since that's what I prefer to stay with. I'm going to go ahead and migrate but then I'm on the fence now if I should go back to proxmox but not sure as I'm still on the fence for going back to a true hypervisor.
@@orfeous I forgot which is which, but I prefer either a debian/RHEL based environment since those are my dailies and more comfortable than a FreeBSD system
@@Frankie_Freedom same here. Maybe I misunderstood your message? I'm used to Debian as well and been running it on and off since 90s. Scale would be best for me also as you said too. But I'm thinking of running a PC with ESXi as hypervisor and run TrueNAS Scale as VM. I have a plan of running 1-2 small Debian VM also on the ESXi. Really nice management with the free vSphere. But I don't know if it's a good idea or not. My goal is to replace my current NAS a Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 4 with 4x4TB WD Red drives. The hardware is outdated and also limited to the Netgear apps and stuff. Now Netgear also shutdown the cloud and sync services for this OS so I can only use it for file sharing locally on the LAN. Scavenging Google for a suitable NAS case. That also has future expandability features. Like 6-8 bays or something. And slits for PCIe card/s like HBA or/and 10gig
Even with bhyve and the new web interface, BHCP? I think the virtualization on FreeBSD with bhyve is blazingly fast, way to set up with the new control panel, and just simply unknown or overshadowed by the others the presenter named, due mostly to bhyve getting a Kate start. Look into it. I think CORE will do a good job with virtualization if the cou has the right properties and is supported by bhyve.
I want to use retro games in VMs including Win32 and DOS guest OS's. I have read that TrueNAS cannot do 32 or 16 bit x86 OS's. Is that true? If so, what other virtualization platform will work for x86 OS's from 16-bit DOS and both 16 and 32 bit Windows?
Maybe the performance gap between Core and Scale stems from the fact that FreeBSD is CCDL and hence has ZFS in the kernel whereas Linux needs to use OpenZFS or have it run in user space?
Bsd on servers is generally faster then linux. That's why Netflix uses freebsd as their main server os. But also it is true that the linux zfs support isn't nearly as old, mature and optimized as bsd
Wondering if someone can explain the performance hit you have to accept when virtualizing truenas (vs installing on dedicated HW). I get it if one has limited real estate and wants to run everything on a single box but I’d think a nas would be the last thing you’d want to do this with. Do you actually get better performance because you’ve taken networking bottlenecks and delays out of the equation?
The performance loss is hard to calculate as it depends on lots of variables in the hypervisor which is why we do no use that setup in production environments.
Thank you for an interesting video. I'm still thinking about whether to change my server to proxmox or truenas scale. I'm a retired software engineer, so this is just "home lab playing about", having said that I host a number of websites. My current system is ubuntu 20.04 and docker on zfs. I have 6x8tb disks, plus 1TB ssd and 1TB nvme arranged as a slow pool and a couple of faster pools. I have about 20 docker-compose stacks, including a couple of horrendous ones that really should be VMs (mail and pbx). I only have the one server (Xeon, 64GB ECC ram) and I'm finding the thought of trying to minimise downtime a bit of a challenge. And then, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" - but where's the fun in that!
Can someone tell me if I update my truenas core via the GUI where it tells me there is an update, will it whip my data? I don't wanna lose my important files from updating it.
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS sorry, that’s more of a pondering, not quoting you. Sorry for the confusion there. Being a long time ESXi admin/geek I have a love/hate relationship with file based storage for VMs. Sometimes I love it, sometimes I hate it. I remember reading about RHEL implementing an iSCSI target that was backed by a gluster volume, which even now is hard to wrap my head around. My understanding of gluster is that the volume is mounted via FUSE and then you can use CIFS or NFS to export it. I guess a virtual block device could be setup and presented as an iSCSI target, but that’s where my brain kinda breaks. But either way, when you mentioned gluster as a virtualization storage backing that was the first place my brain went.
What if I don't need to store a whole god damned petabyte of data that's being thrashed by multiple clients all day? Can I use fewer than 16GB of RAM, which would defeat the entire purpose of a BUDGET ALTERNATIVE to other cloud services?
Performance keeps me back from scale. Docker does not necessarily work as one might expect, if you don't go for TrueCharts you can only ports above 9000... Installed core yesterday and despite performance advantage, scale feels more intuitive... Well in ixsystems we trust 😉
That's not true. Use the network type "load balancer" with Truecharts applications and you can choose whatever port you want. In their guide they specifically set up pihole to use port 53, with load balancer. And they also have a docker compose application, where you can load a docker compose stack WITHIN the application. You can even launch portainer with it.
@@Ky-vv8nj As mentioned -without TrueCharts- no other ports than 9000 - but I will give it look, thanks for pointing that out! You have a link or something?
@@nixxblikka ua-cam.com/video/kQe7mhWu3Gs/v-deo.html My bad I misread that as "even with Truecharts". But there's the link of someone putting portainer on Truenas Scale, with Truecharts.
I am using scale version because I love the GlusterFS. Never ever use truenas scale for VM, docker. A ZFS NAS is a storage server First then others are extra low priority. The ZCatch will fill up your 900 TB of ram making you docker containers die one at a time.
I have about 20 computers and 100x - 1TB drives. I also have solar panels with an excess of KWh. Would it be stupid of me to get all these drives and run a bunch of these computers as a storage cluster in the garage?
Haha you are describing my dream. Playing around with this many machines without having a bad conscience regarding electricity waste. Go for it! And pls make a blog or video or something! At that cluster size Ceph might also be interesting.
The other day i found a supee simple guide that explains how to use your boot ssd as a data drive aswell (because true nas is small, otherwise you would be wasting all that space). It even works if you have a mirrored boot drive. Just Google: split ssd during installation reddit
I would highly recommend against doing that, you probably don't want all of that extra wear on your boot device. You can find super tiny M.2 drives that are much more appropriate for that application.
Off topic but I want to make a comment about my Optiplex 3070 SFF with Core i3-9100, 16GB DDR4, factory 256GB NVME + 1TB HDD I have added. I wanted to play with TrueNAS Scale, but for whatever reason, system boots extremely slow as in like 20+ minutes to boot. All seems to be fine once it is booted but it is slow. Also, after the initial installation, when it is asking to reboot and remove installation media, that process is very slow as well. I have tested TrueNAS on Optiple 3050 Tiny with same installation USB and everything work perfectly, boots up extremely fast, maybe around a minute or so. Even after initial installation reboot is near instant too. So I did end up trying to install TrueNAS Core on Optiplex 3070, and it seems to work as it should, very fast at initial reboot from installation and every boot up is very very fast. Very frustrating....
Do a video on a DIY build (on paper is fine) of a 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, 10,000 dollar system and what kind of loads each of them can handle. All of them should be hybrid solutions of SSD/NVME and HDD.
We have a single, decently powerful server running Hyper-V. I hear a lot about the simplicity of docker and would like to start using it. Do you think running TrueNAS Scale inside a VM for this purpose would be a good idea?
I installed scale on an old WIN10 Pro 2011 desktop w/AMD 8-core FX-8120 AMD CPU on Gigabyte 990 mobo with 16G memory. Gave the VM 12G Memory. It provides SMB shares at full 1G on integrated Realtec NIC, Plex for 350G of photos and does mac time machine backups over wifi so far. Less than 1 week old. Successfully added TrueCharts 2nd catalog but have not added more apps. Using SSD and NMVE for cache, log and Meta vdevs and oddball old HDDs with a mix of internal 3.5 and 5.25 HDDs and external USB 3.0 passthu drive and vdisks to match sizes for RaidZ. Best use of and old machine that still works as a full Win 10 desktop while running Truenas nicely.
@SuperWhisk Ah thanks. Main stuff is on VMs, but seems like a lot of apps have ready-made dockers and it would be simpler to deploy them that way. Such as the Unifi controller for example.
@@Galileo63 IIRC zfs wants direct access to the disks, otherwise you are at risk losing your data, therefore you need to pay through the disks / controller...
CULT OF ZFS Shirt
lawrence-technology-services.creator-spring.com/listing/cult-of-zfs
TrueNAS Tutorials
lawrence.technology/truenas-tutorials/
Documentation
www.truenas.com/docs/core/
TrueCommand
www.truenas.com/truecommand/
Download TrueNAS Scale
www.truenas.com/download-truenas-scale/
Download TrueNAS Core
www.truenas.com/download-truenas-core/
TrueNAS HA Failover Demo
ua-cam.com/video/LtJXmJToGzs/v-deo.html
⏱ Timestamps ⏱
00:00 TrueNAS Core VS TrueNAS Scale
01:30 TrueNAS Enterprise Support
02:52 How Scale and Core are the same
03:18 ZFS Replication
03:52 Container & Virtualization Differences
05:50 GlusterFS
08:16 TrueNAS Interface
08:48 Scale VS Core for Performance
10:40 Virtualization
Oh the good old ASCII cow
This video is jam packed with information. I was aware of the operating system switch but the container and virtualization differences are equally important. Of course for many applications performance is paramount, as is having a mature system that has been field tested for many generations vs a system that's just out of the gate and still in early development. For bleeding edge aficionados Scale is king whereas performance and stability favor Core.
Dropping by to say that if you haven't taken the time to upgrade to TrueNAS Scale yet, take the down-time and DO IT! All of my weird performance quirks and suddenly fixed.
Yep! TrueNAS Scale is the way to go!
Best is that it based on Debian. I've been using it since the 90s and know it well. Thumbs up from me!
This is super timely video! I’ve just started looking at TrueNAS. I had looked at FreeNAS years ago but went with unraid as I had different sized drives and wanted to run my gaming PC as a VM. That’s not the case anymore so now im considering shifting to TrueNAS. I still want to run a VM on there and some containers. Mainly Plex and HooBs and a handful of other containers. So debating if it’s worth moving to TrueNAS or just rebuilding my Unraid.
This video has given me a great over view of “free” TrueNAS options.
Given that I am on a micro budget for my home lab. I run an esx box and Truenas box. When I started to outgrow my ESX box, i decided to try moving a couple of VM's over to the virtual machine component of Truenas to try it out. And found that it is certainly no where near as feature rich as ESX. And basically concluded its provisional at best.
But that said, I found it more than adequate to handle the couple light tasks I ported to it. And its performance was actually better than I expected too. It has a long way to go to be a replacement for my ESX box even for my use case, but it certainly was a nice addition to my setup. And even though I have now upgraded my ESX box to be quite a bit more powerful and have much more ram ect, I have not bothered moving the VM's back from Truenas KVM to it. Even though the process is not all that hard to do. I find they are just fine running where they are.
My conclusion is Truenas KVM works just fine if your needs for it are modest and you just want to throw up a windows vm for a game server or something. Or in my case I use it for a torrent downloader and another vm for a private game server. Neither really need a lot of CPU or ram or any special configuration. So for this its just fine. But I can see where its limitations would quickly mount up if I decided to move everything over to it.
Two questions:
1) Are you able to remove a gluster brick from a gluster volume?
I've tried to do that before with "normal" Gluster, and it didn't seem like that there was really a way to do that?
2) What kind of a performance hit are we talking about by moving to TrueNAS Scale from TrueNAS Core? 10%? 20%? 30%?
just switched from core to scale. Love it.
Your videos deliver the goods.... Always...THANK YOU!
Truenas core works just fine on my 11th gen i3 system but upgrading to scale or trying to install scale just goes pear-shaped. And i have believed for maaaany years that linux has way better hw support than BSD.
Finally some one that explain exactly what is TrueNAS Scale. Is incredible how many UA-camrs spread the wrong information just to get some click making videos on a new product. 🤘🤘🤘🤘
Moreover containers are still less secure and less mature than Jails.
If you care about the security of your system and data is really not good idea using TrueNAS scale for many month to comme. Maybe in Q3 2022 is the right moment to think about a mgration.
Yeah, we are in middle 2023 now :)
@@orfeous almost middle of 24😅...
What u guys think now.
I really want to learn gluster fs it sounds really interesting
As a home user who's no expert I felt truenas scale is probably a little more newb friendly. Setting up the acl's seemed easier, there's broader hardware support (specifically my realtek nic). The apps are cool but it does feel like scale is a little more resource hungry. Or maybe I'm just loading too many apps at once on an old system.
RealTek seems to work very well as long as you use the boot/modules/if_re.ko driver enabled in Tunables.
The video I've been waiting for!
Thanks for the breakdown! I'm setting up my first storage server and this was very helpful.
Thanks for making this! Would really like a video about gluster pros and cons.
Good work again as ever Tom. Core is downloading now and I think I'll wipe and rebuild my lab then upgrade my production system to Core in a couple of months.
How has that gone?
I'm sticking with Core until Scale is more refined but I'm looking forward for more Scale videos.
Gluster seems a lot like CEPH. I run a 3 node (PCs) proxmox cluster using off the shelf hardware. Each node's storage (20TB HDD and 500GB SSD) are mirrored across the 3 nodes using the built-in CEPH module. If a PC/HDD/SSD goes down, I have 2 more PCs with the same identical data in their storage. The VM's are running with High Availability so if a node goes down, the VM automatically starts on the 2nd node. Each node has 3 Network cards, 1 for the office network which accesses the VMs, 1 for the Proxmox VM Clustering operations and 1 for the CEPH Storage mirroring operations.
Hey Tom - have you tested the performance hit going to scale? The last video I saw where you talked about that; you showed some screen shots of a forum post where the loss in performance was dramatically worse. Any update on that?
Still not performing as well with Scale. Here is the forum post www.truenas.com/community/threads/22-02-release-performance-regressions.99236/#post-684643
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS the performance of scale is horrendous! Cannot see how this kind of performance is anywhere acceptable for a released product. Its literally 4 times slower than Core !
Just wanted to point out a point that i think you missed on. TrueNAS Scale only supports SMB with "Scaled-Out ZFS" using Gluster. This is currently a major limitation for me right now. pNFS 4.1 would have made more sense for "Scaled-Out ZFS" using Gluster dont know why they didnt do this first?
9:31 how much of a perf drop are we talking about?
I am more used to working with Linux than BSD. But wondering if I should do an in-place migration from Core to Scale...
The scaling out feature of TrueNas Scale already exists out there in a mature, tried-and-true, open source product called CEPH. If one is looking for a scaling-out-enabled open source system, s/he need not bother with TrueNas Scale, and instead, go straight to CEPH.
Ceph is useful in many scenarios but doesn’t do SMB and NFS
Would love to see an updated video on why you prefer xcp-ng over proxmox (et al). Browsed your many videos and they are a bit aged, so not sure how relevant the comparisons are.
The downside with all those videos is that they needs to be up to date. They're useless when all software and stuff updates.
So, we will, eventually, be able to use commodity hardware to build individual storage nodes in, for example, 3U 12 drive servers, then pull those together into a logically central interface through multiple control nodes that will be both redundant and load balanced, to get petabytes of software defined storage? Sounds like high end enterprise storage at a lot lower cost. I like that idea.
As long as you pay the truecommand subscription which scales with number of drives yes you should be able to do that
Can you please make a video showing out how to swap a HDD on a RAID at truenas Scale. Thank you.
9:29
Anyone use PFsense/OPNsense which based on freebsd?
And, truenas core also use freebsd.
Is the Realtek Ethernet performance issue also occure in Truenas core?
5:20 DE-BIAN xD
Never heard DEB-IAN pronounced like that.
Sorry.
I'm excited to learn TrueNAS Scale, I didn't like FreeBSD's lack of NFS config options, so I just run my pool on Proxmox.
Please do an updated performance video between Core and Scale since the new updates might have changed the results. It's the only thing I want to know before making the switch.
Any news/progress on this?
As this video is 9 month old.. Is there any chance to see a video on setting up glusterfs with truenas scale?
Is it a best practise to setup a singe truenas scale with trueCommand to build a one node glusterfs - just in case you want to expand in a year or so? If you setup glusterfs later, you have to move all your data - glusterfs will wipe all you hdds
Really not sure as their glusterfs documentation is currently non existent www.truenas.com/docs/search/?query=gluster
Thank you gor these gems of videos before doing sny research (i know i know) i went out bought a Synology DS1621+ added 64GB of ram 10GB nic and 6x18TB Exos drives. But i a made a Cardinal Sin 🤦♂️went built the arrey i chose JBOD so i had more storage available. Now (months later) i have zero protection and 56TB of data so plan is build in the Jonsbo N3 load up 8x22TB Drive's 2x2TB Nvme drives 64GB of ram it'll be running on a Amd Ryzen 5700G on the Asus Strix x570 it'll only need 1 VM,
Plan is get the raid array on True Nas Raid 5 at least copy over all data from the Synology then wipe the Synology reset rebuild the array with Raid 5 sonit can be a backup target for the new True Nas Server.
Thank you for this video, really helps to select!
I just "upgraded" to TrueNAS Scale yesterday following your guide from a few months ago. I only ran into one configuration issue with my smb shares. ( There was an option on them that was not available on Linux, deleted it and moved on.) I am much more familiar with Linux was the reason. Next, I need PFSense to make a Linux version.
Check out VyOS, though CLI
pfsense is too deeply linked to BSD to move over to Linux.
there is the IPFire
@@kirle5455 It's not as well built as PFSense is. And the PF firewall in BSD is much better than IPCHAINS in Linux. The main development coordinator also decides to remove functionality when he determines that it's a security problem even thought it's provided by a package that doesn't have to be installed. He did that with UPNP functionality. So I've given up on IPFire for home use anyway.
I've been waiting for Scale to be officially released so I can change over to it.
Just one quick question about the virtualization on TrNa-Sc. When I checked, I saw that it used KVM for virtualization, but I was wondering if that was all. I only need virt/con for one(1) Win10 instance, which I do on a regular Linux workstation which runs the KVM/QEMU/Virt-Manager stack - and then send it out with X2Go to any screen I want. Would I still be able to install this stack on TrNa-Sc?
I just installed core on the server at work.
Was thinking of going with scale, still might test it, but I only have shares for the couple windows 10 PCs that connect to it for storage.
I've been wondering about Scale for some time.
What is the specific advantage of being able to use docker or k8s?
virtual machine? container? So what?
If you can access data and files as a NAS and can monitor it and it is stable, isn't that necessary and sufficient?
What can you do by moving to The Scale?
The big advantage is there are more apps available on Scale
If I want to setup a 10G home NAS...I'm assuming TrueNAS Core should be ideal for that? I was thinking of installing ProxMox and then add TruNAS Core as a VM and pass the card through...probably a SFP+ Mellanox card.
Very interesting ....
I am running OMV with ZFS due to TrueNAS shortcomings for my home setup (Docker, etc)
TrueNAS Scale looks like it addresses the issues. I do like OMV's ACL manager. I haven't seen this in TrueNas core yet though.
I virtualised my OMV on XCP-NG. I would likely do the same with TrueNAS core. Mainly for snapshots and backups.
If you haven't already, check out Tom's video on why running TrueNAS in a VM is a bad idea. But if it suits your needs then ignore me :P
@@vaughngx4 that video is a broad over generalization and doesn't apply to all setups. For example, none of what he said applies to me since I'm passing the whole HBA card through to the VM. Likewise, I don't think it applies to many home users at all if they're passing the drives directly to the VM. The only thing the video talks about is using ZFS on top of a virtualized disk.
Major difference, Unix kernel vice Linux kernel. For me, it Scale does t use bhyve for its hypervisor, major thing for me. Not much else that’s different really hits my radar as they both still use ZFS and the network stack benefits of FreeBSD isn’t needed for me in my NAS.
I like your take on containers/jails. The compute and data should be separate so the compute is ephemeral and doesn’t matter.
thanks great take on the topic
I use ESXi for all my virtual machines (NFS and iSCSI) and TrueNAS only for file storage/sharing/etc in my home network. Would Scale give me any benefits over Core at all?
Nope, not at this point in time.
I have the same plans. Running VMware ESXi and with vSphere and runt TrueNAS Scale as a VM since it's Debian based and I'm used to that.
Also wanted to install some small Debian servers aswell as VMs on that ESXi server. Like AD and LDAP
Time have passed since this very old and outdated video and lots of changes and fixes has been done on TrueNAS Scale! Performance have been increased etc.
Still, Truenas has a gap on scaling the storage capacity incrementally. To add storage capacity later, without loosing/move data, and keep a basic protection you have no solution.
How about TrueNAS Scale vs TrueNAS Core for RealTek LAN? FreeBSD people tell you to avoid Realtek LAN (i.e. pfSense community) but the Linux community never mentions a problem with Realtek LAN.
I avoid them on Linux as well.
hi where are the links to the other videos you mentioned ???
As always fantastic advce, thanks for the video.
I am still looking for that video where you said you removed a live running mobo from a TrueNAS Enterprise System. I do not see it linked currently 2023-12-06.
ua-cam.com/video/LtJXmJToGzs/v-deo.htmlsi=LdQnSq9g0FhLNWRq
Will have 2 NAS drives running TrueNAS Core can I sync both for redundant backup files?
Dear Tom, I would’ve liked if can hire your company to help us with our IT predicament, but unfortunately we’re located in Eastern Europe and I fear your professional reach isn’t that wide. However, I find your content very educational and enlightening, thus I am pushing our ITs to broaden their horizons outside MS $h1t they’re used to. Thanks for your effort!!!
I think you’re a scammer
Interesting question. I have a migrated freenas and a windows server. The server runs milestone for my camera system.. With The new Scale. Could I virtualize to allow it to run the windows milestone and allow it to see the video card that is used for graphics rendering? or would that be a bad idea with a nas? otherwise its mainly a file storage device for me.. but if I could then I could actually decomission the server :P
I'm curious is their intention to continue making both Core and Scale or is one the future of the project? - Seems like a lot of work to maintain both.
They have the resources to keep both going.
i am trying to connect and configure UPS on my truenas scale box but I only get ttyl 0 and 1 and uhid. how can I configure the ups, it is connected through USB and it is the SMT750 ups, I keep getting alerts that the communication to the UPS is lost. all other settings are right just identifying the right USB, I used /dev/usb/hiddev0 which is where the ups is supposed to be.
Excellent video thanks 4 Chile
That was my concern, It's why I went with core, although I prefer the debian based since that's what I prefer to stay with. I'm going to go ahead and migrate but then I'm on the fence now if I should go back to proxmox but not sure as I'm still on the fence for going back to a true hypervisor.
Why can't you go with Scale?
@@orfeous I forgot which is which, but I prefer either a debian/RHEL based environment since those are my dailies and more comfortable than a FreeBSD system
@@Frankie_Freedom same here. Maybe I misunderstood your message? I'm used to Debian as well and been running it on and off since 90s. Scale would be best for me also as you said too. But I'm thinking of running a PC with ESXi as hypervisor and run TrueNAS Scale as VM. I have a plan of running 1-2 small Debian VM also on the ESXi. Really nice management with the free vSphere.
But I don't know if it's a good idea or not.
My goal is to replace my current NAS a Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 4 with 4x4TB WD Red drives. The hardware is outdated and also limited to the Netgear apps and stuff. Now Netgear also shutdown the cloud and sync services for this OS so I can only use it for file sharing locally on the LAN.
Scavenging Google for a suitable NAS case. That also has future expandability features. Like 6-8 bays or something. And slits for PCIe card/s like HBA or/and 10gig
@@Frankie_Freedom would be kind if you want to ball some ideas/suggestions 😊
Even with bhyve and the new web interface, BHCP? I think the virtualization on FreeBSD with bhyve is blazingly fast, way to set up with the new control panel, and just simply unknown or overshadowed by the others the presenter named, due mostly to bhyve getting a Kate start. Look into it. I think CORE will do a good job with virtualization if the cou has the right properties and is supported by bhyve.
3:55 Did I just witness a glitch in The Matrix?
Maybe I missed it thanks to UA-cam but it would be nice to do update on this topic
Possibly, the differences are the same but Scale has become stable.
I want to use retro games in VMs including Win32 and DOS guest OS's. I have read that TrueNAS cannot do 32 or 16 bit x86 OS's. Is that true? If so, what other virtualization platform will work for x86 OS's from 16-bit DOS and both 16 and 32 bit Windows?
Maybe the performance gap between Core and Scale stems from the fact that FreeBSD is CCDL and hence has ZFS in the kernel whereas Linux needs to use OpenZFS or have it run in user space?
Bsd on servers is generally faster then linux. That's why Netflix uses freebsd as their main server os. But also it is true that the linux zfs support isn't nearly as old, mature and optimized as bsd
Great info thanks!
There is a gui in true command if you're running the I guess it's a developer build version.
Newer than tag:latest
For glusterfs
In docker
i go to proxmox and esxi and only after i virtualize truenas.
Wondering if someone can explain the performance hit you have to accept when virtualizing truenas (vs installing on dedicated HW). I get it if one has limited real estate and wants to run everything on a single box but I’d think a nas would be the last thing you’d want to do this with. Do you actually get better performance because you’ve taken networking bottlenecks and delays out of the equation?
The performance loss is hard to calculate as it depends on lots of variables in the hypervisor which is why we do no use that setup in production environments.
Thank you for an interesting video. I'm still thinking about whether to change my server to proxmox or truenas scale. I'm a retired software engineer, so this is just "home lab playing about", having said that I host a number of websites. My current system is ubuntu 20.04 and docker on zfs. I have 6x8tb disks, plus 1TB ssd and 1TB nvme arranged as a slow pool and a couple of faster pools. I have about 20 docker-compose stacks, including a couple of horrendous ones that really should be VMs (mail and pbx). I only have the one server (Xeon, 64GB ECC ram) and I'm finding the thought of trying to minimise downtime a bit of a challenge. And then, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" - but where's the fun in that!
Counterpoint to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is "if it ain't perfect, tinker" 🤗
Can someone tell me if I update my truenas core via the GUI where it tells me there is an update, will it whip my data? I don't wanna lose my important files from updating it.
You can proceed with the update. It won't affect your data.
if i want to make nas and run docker, Scale is better right?
Core can't run docker, so yes.
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS thank 🥰
Is there no professional support available for the Linux-based product (Scale) from ixSystems? Since TrueNas Enterprise is also FreeBSD based?
iSCSI target on GlusterFS?????
Huh? I said Gluster as a storage target for virtualization.
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS sorry, that’s more of a pondering, not quoting you. Sorry for the confusion there. Being a long time ESXi admin/geek I have a love/hate relationship with file based storage for VMs. Sometimes I love it, sometimes I hate it.
I remember reading about RHEL implementing an iSCSI target that was backed by a gluster volume, which even now is hard to wrap my head around. My understanding of gluster is that the volume is mounted via FUSE and then you can use CIFS or NFS to export it. I guess a virtual block device could be setup and presented as an iSCSI target, but that’s where my brain kinda breaks.
But either way, when you mentioned gluster as a virtualization storage backing that was the first place my brain went.
What if I don't need to store a whole god damned petabyte of data that's being thrashed by multiple clients all day? Can I use fewer than 16GB of RAM, which would defeat the entire purpose of a BUDGET ALTERNATIVE to other cloud services?
Performance keeps me back from scale. Docker does not necessarily work as one might expect, if you don't go for TrueCharts you can only ports above 9000... Installed core yesterday and despite performance advantage, scale feels more intuitive... Well in ixsystems we trust 😉
That's not true. Use the network type "load balancer" with Truecharts applications and you can choose whatever port you want. In their guide they specifically set up pihole to use port 53, with load balancer.
And they also have a docker compose application, where you can load a docker compose stack WITHIN the application. You can even launch portainer with it.
@@Ky-vv8nj As mentioned -without TrueCharts- no other ports than 9000 - but I will give it look, thanks for pointing that out! You have a link or something?
@@nixxblikka ua-cam.com/video/kQe7mhWu3Gs/v-deo.html
My bad I misread that as "even with Truecharts". But there's the link of someone putting portainer on Truenas Scale, with Truecharts.
I am using scale version because I love the GlusterFS. Never ever use truenas scale for VM, docker. A ZFS NAS is a storage server First then others are extra low priority. The ZCatch will fill up your 900 TB of ram making you docker containers die one at a time.
I wish they'll add LXCs to Scale someday, so I can wave Proxmox goodbyes.
good video. However You didn't tell enough about virtualization core will support.
I never use the virtualization in TrueNAS Core
real video start at 2:50 your're welcome
I have about 20 computers and 100x - 1TB drives. I also have solar panels with an excess of KWh. Would it be stupid of me to get all these drives and run a bunch of these computers as a storage cluster in the garage?
Haha you are describing my dream. Playing around with this many machines without having a bad conscience regarding electricity waste. Go for it! And pls make a blog or video or something! At that cluster size Ceph might also be interesting.
The other day i found a supee simple guide that explains how to use your boot ssd as a data drive aswell (because true nas is small, otherwise you would be wasting all that space). It even works if you have a mirrored boot drive.
Just Google:
split ssd during installation reddit
I would highly recommend against doing that, you probably don't want all of that extra wear on your boot device.
You can find super tiny M.2 drives that are much more appropriate for that application.
If you understood less than 50% of what I said, use Scale. The rest of you can use Core.
Off topic but I want to make a comment about my Optiplex 3070 SFF with Core i3-9100, 16GB DDR4, factory 256GB NVME + 1TB HDD I have added.
I wanted to play with TrueNAS Scale, but for whatever reason, system boots extremely slow as in like 20+ minutes to boot. All seems to be fine once it is booted but it is slow. Also, after the initial installation, when it is asking to reboot and remove installation media, that process is very slow as well.
I have tested TrueNAS on Optiple 3050 Tiny with same installation USB and everything work perfectly, boots up extremely fast, maybe around a minute or so. Even after initial installation reboot is near instant too.
So I did end up trying to install TrueNAS Core on Optiplex 3070, and it seems to work as it should, very fast at initial reboot from installation and every boot up is very very fast.
Very frustrating....
Try a newer version! Lots of time have passed since this old outdated video :)
XCP-NG it is xD thanks Tom! Needed that.
I wanted to play around with xcp ng recently, but seems deprecated?
Do a video on a DIY build (on paper is fine) of a 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, 10,000 dollar system and what kind of loads each of them can handle. All of them should be hybrid solutions of SSD/NVME and HDD.
We have a single, decently powerful server running Hyper-V. I hear a lot about the simplicity of docker and would like to start using it. Do you think running TrueNAS Scale inside a VM for this purpose would be a good idea?
I installed scale on an old WIN10 Pro 2011 desktop w/AMD 8-core FX-8120 AMD CPU on Gigabyte 990 mobo with 16G memory. Gave the VM 12G Memory. It provides SMB shares at full 1G on integrated Realtec NIC, Plex for 350G of photos and does mac time machine backups over wifi so far. Less than 1 week old. Successfully added TrueCharts 2nd catalog but have not added more apps. Using SSD and NMVE for cache, log and Meta vdevs and oddball old HDDs with a mix of internal 3.5 and 5.25 HDDs and external USB 3.0 passthu drive and vdisks to match sizes for RaidZ. Best use of and old machine that still works as a full Win 10 desktop while running Truenas nicely.
@SuperWhisk Ah thanks. Main stuff is on VMs, but seems like a lot of apps have ready-made dockers and it would be simpler to deploy them that way. Such as the Unifi controller for example.
@@Galileo63 IIRC zfs wants direct access to the disks, otherwise you are at risk losing your data, therefore you need to pay through the disks / controller...
I thought the scale was the "enterprise" paid version
Nope
3+ minutes and still waiting for the information to compare....
First
TrueNas? More like TrueAss .
Sounds like needlessly splitting it up.