TrueNAS Scale Beta 1 -- this is freaking awesome!
Daniel Nashed – 28 July 2021 17:56:18
My friend and co HCL Ambassador Daniele Vistalli pointed out this new platform which is build by the company that originally build FreeNAS. When quickly checking the website I got so excited to drop everything for two hours and look into it ASAP.
I didn't check the diagram below and looked under the covers after it was installed after 10 minutes in a VM.
Here is the link to check all the details --> https://www.truenas.com/truenas-scale
This combines all the stuff I have looking into the last weeks!
The original FreeNAS was always supporting OpenZFS which is an interesting file-system on it's own.
Scalability, flexibility, reliability, native/transparent compression & deduplication and snapshots!
The always offered great connectivity like SMB, NFS, iSCSI. But what they did add in TrueNAS Scale is truly amazing.
When I looked into how it is build, I noticed a lot of technology I already know and love. And this platform brings it all into one seamless integrated platform -- installed in 10 minutes.
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1. OpenZFS fully integrated as the foundation
2. Docker current release
3. k3s - the very efficient but enterprise ready Kubernetes - I blogged about it before and this is the platform I am using for a while already. -> https://k3s.io/
4. The OpenEBS storage driver for ZFS which allows k3s to use ZFS storage natively --> https://openebs.io/
5. Helm and an application platform to run containers on top of k3s
6. You can just define Docker containers or use their catalog application on GitHub to define Helm charts to define your applications. -> https://github.com/truecharts/apps
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Specially the ZFS storage driver is a very interesting step. This offers a K8s native interface to ZFS volumes in a ZFS pool.
And it also implements a native snapshot class to snapshot PVC storage.
I already played around with it to use K8s API to snapshot Domino instances directly from Domino Backup to build a native Kubernetes integration for Domino.
Setting up this combination on my own wasn't that easy. I had to compile the OpenZFS driver. Deploy the OpenEBS storage and snapshot driver into k3s and get all components glue together.
Now this platform takes 10 minutes to install and offer all of this as the standard out of the box storage with all options available out of the box.
In addition they have a simple to use UI with many additional storage options and integrations.
For example S3 Minio can be installed as one of the pre-defined applications. And I looked into and example how to setup Pi-hole in 5 minutes configuring it thru a Docker image as well.
This platform has a lot of potential and I am already excited looking into it briefly. They also have REST API and a lot other functionality which makes it enterprise ready.
OpenZFS also has some other interesting options to mirror and backup storage. And the hyper-converged environment sounds like an interesting scale out option as well.
And I didn't even mention the more standard functionality like running Windows/Linux VMs and Linux containers ..
-- Daniel
this comes out of the box automatically without anything to configure:
kubectl get storageclasses
NAME PROVISIONER RECLAIMPOLICY VOLUMEBINDINGMODE ALLOWVOLUMEEXPANSION AGE
openebs-zfspv-default (default) zfs.csi.openebs.io Delete Immediate true 6h
ix-storage-class-minio zfs.csi.openebs.io Retain Immediate true 5h58m
kubectl get VolumeSnapshotClass
NAME DRIVER DELETIONPOLICY AGE
zfspv-default-snapshot-class zfs.csi.openebs.io Delete 5h59m
https://www.truenas.com/truenas-scale
- Comments [3]
1Eric Mack 28.07.2021 21:06:53 TrueNAS Scale Beta 1 -- this is freaking awesome!
Daniel, as you know, I use Synology NAS and thanks to help from you and a few others, I finally managed to get Domino 12 running in docker - I have 3 servers all running on a small nas. Happy to share what I have learned along the way. You know where to find me. Thank you for all that you do for the community. All the best. Eric
2Daniel Nashed 29.07.2021 8:06:13 TrueNAS Scale Beta 1 -- this is freaking awesome!
Hi Eric,
Thomas Hampel and myself are running this GitHub project which provides a very configurable image that you can automatically build based on the Domino Linux webkit --> https://github.com/IBM/domino-docker.
In the context of our project Thomas started to look into NAS environments a while ago already. And we have it running on multiple NAS environments.
The challenge is not the image but the way those providers allow you to specify settings like security settings "capabilities" and the way they mount volumes.
Specially depending how volumes are mounted can be a challenge during first setup. Our image does provide all the support for the NAS environments.
And we also have an integrated my Domino start script inside the container to allow complete management of the Domino server inside the container.
-- Daniel
3Eric Mack 29.07.2021 22:39:51 TrueNAS Scale Beta 1 -- this is freaking awesome!
Great news. Please keep me posted if you want me to test something.
Best of success!
Eric