iXsystems recently announced it’s launch of TrueNAS Enterprise version 12.0 BETA. The BETA release has completed two full cycles of QA and testing from almost 1,000 users. There are no high priority issues and iXsystems now recommends that the Community upgrade their FreeNAS 11.3 systems and start their TrueNAS 12.0 testing. Along with a new version, there is also a new TrueNAS logo in use for TrueNAS Enterprise.
TrueNAS 12.0 BETA is the first major deliverable of the FreeNAS/TrueNAS Unification Process, which has already brought abut several of the major expected benefits, including:
- Rapid Development: Unified images have accelerated software development.
- Improved Quality: Reduced development redundancy and unified QA has increased software quality.
- Earlier Hardware Enablement: TrueNAS 12.0 brings improved support for AMD EPYC / Ryzen platforms and enhanced NUMA support for more efficient CPU core handling. Tell us your stories!
- Simplified Documentation: The 1st release of the unified TrueNAS 12.0 documentation is now available and includes the capability for user contributions.
- Reduced Redundancy: We are now starting to produce unified web content and videos which refer to one software family without the need for duplication.
- Flexibility: Unified images enable simpler transitions or upgrades between editions.
- Resource efficiency: Software developers are freed to work on new features and related projects like TrueNAS SCALE.
- OpenZFS 2.0: The major investment in the development and integration of “OpenZFS 2.0” is paying off with advances like dataset encryption, major performance improvements, and compatibility with Linux ZFS pools which was needed for TrueNAS SCALE.
TrueNAS 12.0 Features
The master feature list for TrueNAS 12.0 is below. The features in black existed in FreeNAS 11.3 and are shared by both TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise. The features in blue have been added to TrueNAS 12.0. The column to the right displays features that are available in TrueNAS Enterprise only. TrueNAS 12.0 CORE has a superset of FreeNAS 11.3 features.
The feature additions for TrueNAS 12.0 have been summarized as:
- Metadata on Flash: Special SSD vdevs can be used for Metadata acceleration. This can include both file systems metadata and dedupe tables. This is one of the core features of OpenZFS 2.0.
- Fusion Pools: The special SSD vdevs can also be used for data based on I/O write size. This is configurable on a per dataset basis. Users can accelerate database datasets or special VMs.
- SSD Wear Monitoring: Any SSD (Boot, L2ARC, slog or vdev) can be monitored for wear and alerts created.
- Dataset Encryption: Specific datasets can be selected or deselected for encryption with a user-provided key. When replicating the dataset to another TrueNAS, the key does not have to be provided and so the data can be transmitted and stored in the original encrypted state.
- Asynchronous ZFS Trim: Trim commands free up space, particularly within SSDs. By making these Trim commands asynchronous, they scale and perform better. This is particularly useful for deduplication of flash storage and can significantly reduce costs.
- Faster ZFS Boot: OpenZFS 2.0 includes a more parallel process for importing a ZFS pool with many drives. This reduces boot and failover times.
- ZFS Linux Compatibility: Linux and FreeBSD are peer operating systems for OpenZFS 2.0. Compressed, deduplicated, and encrypted data can be efficiently replicated from a Linux host to a TrueNAS system for backup and archive. It is also possible to import a pool (drive set) from Linux to TrueNAS. This is being used to start the TrueNAS SCALE project which supports scale-out storage and hyperconvergence.
- Accelerated ZFS: Several performance improvements have been made to reduce both drive IOPS and the CPU cycles required.
- User Quota Support: Allows setting per-user storage quotas which are enforced by ZFS for both NFS and SMB shares. Users can be local or AD/LDAP.
- OpenVPN Client and Server: VPNs provide security for remotely accessing storage services, such as SMB or NFS, across the Internet. This feature enables the OpenVPN Client or Server to be included in the NAS for simpler administration and lower costs. The other end of the VPN connection can be any OpenVPN client, such as another NAS, Firewall Device, or Personal Desktop/Laptop.
- Two Factor Authentication: This ensures that a compromised root password cannot be used by itself to gain access to the administrator interface.
- API Keys: Access to the REST / WebSockets API can now be done via API keys which can be created and revoked directly via the WebUI for additional security.
- KMIP Support: Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) is an Enterprise feature for securing drives or datasets through a centralized key management system.
- TrueCommand Dataset Management: TrueCommand and TrueNAS are joined at the hip and will provide dataset monitoring in TrueCommand 1.3 (to be released in July).
For more information about TrueNAS 12.0 BETA please contact Techgardens at 646-783-4550 or sales@techgardens.com.
