TrueNAS, a leading provider of storage systems, uses OpenZFS as the foundation for its data management layer. As the deployment vehicle for the majority of OpenZFS storage systems used today, TrueNAS is excited about the continuous improvement of OpenZFS.

The 11th annual OpenZFS Developer Summit for 2023 kicked off on October 16th in San Francisco. Among the many exciting projects being developed, two projects stand out with significant contributions and investments from iXsystems.

One of the primary issues with traditional deduplication (dedup) with ZFS has been the need to keep the dedup tables in memory at all times, which led to performance penalties and usability issues. However, with the introduction of Fast Dedup, the metadata size is now constrained to fit in either RAM or flash, eliminating the performance penalty. The metadata structure for Fast Dedup has been completely re-engineered to allow efficient updates and the ability to evict non-deduplicated blocks. These improvements, combined with properly configured storage, will result in a significant improvement in dedup performance for larger systems. Allan Jude, a major sponsor of the Fast Dedup project, will be presenting the details at the summit.

RAIDZ expansion is another exciting project that is entering its final quality assurance cycle. This feature allows a small pool with as few as two drives to be gradually expanded with one drive at a time, preserving existing data with its original parity. The administrative process for small systems has also been simplified. Don Brady and Matt Ahrens will be presenting the latest updates on RAIDZ expansion at the summit. This project has taken a few years but is now in its final stretch and will be included in OpenZFS 2.3.

The current release, OpenZFS 2.2, has been integrated into TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 (Cobia). The release candidate version of Cobia, which includes dRAID, has been successfully provided to the community with over 3,000 testers. The formal release of TrueNAS SCALE 23.10 is planned in the coming weeks. In early 2024, TrueNAS CORE 13.1 will be released with OpenZFS 2.2, and TrueNAS Enterprise appliances will also use OpenZFS 2.2 in their respective software versions.

OpenZFS 2.3 (or potentially 3.0) is expected to take most of the next 12 months to mature and reach release quality and status. The RAIDZ expansion and Fast Dedup features will be integrated with TrueNAS at that time. Early availability of Nightlies and BETA software is expected in mid-2024 for TrueNAS SCALE.

Source: TrueNAS.

TrueNAS SCALE is introducing a new and improved WebUI in the upcoming Cobia (23.10) release. The first Release Candidate for Cobia was launched on September 19th, and it currently has over 2,000 systems running on it. The official release of 23.10 is scheduled for October. The Cobia release includes significant technical advancements such as the new dRAID “Distributed RAID” pool type, an improved Apps UI, and an integrated bug-reporting process.

The new Cobia WebUI has been rearchitected from the CORE WebUI to provide a simpler interface. It is designed to present only the necessary information on each page, with advanced features hidden by default and additional forms appearing as needed. Initial reviews of this modernized and streamlined UI have been positive.

Major improvements have been made to the WebUI in Cobia, including:

• Improved Apps Screens
• Reimagined ZFS Storage Dashboard
• New and Improved Pool Creation Wizard
• Built-in Feedback and Bug Reporting

The Apps Screens in TrueNAS SCALE have been significantly enhanced. Each App is now effectively a Kubernetes Helm Chart that points to container images and provides configuration information for integrating multiple containers into an application. The new Apps screens offer better-structured access to all Apps based on category, and the new Discovery screens assist with App discovery. The Information screen provides details about each App and its sources, and bulk operations for updating Apps are available.

The ZFS Storage Dashboard in Cobia has also been reimagined to handle larger systems with more than a thousand drives. A new Pool Creation Wizard simplifies the process of creating pools based on available resources, automatically selecting drives for vdevs (drive groups) based on their size. The updated Storage Dashboard provides a simple dashboard to display the status of each pool and allows for the creation of new pools or expansion of existing ones using unassigned disks.

A new Feedback and Bug Reporting system has been introduced with TrueNAS SCALE Cobia RC.1. Users can provide feedback on the design of the page, add important details for their use case, and optionally capture a screenshot of the current page. Bug reports can also be submitted, including a brief summary of the issue and the option to attach debug files. Users will receive a TrueNAS ticket link to monitor the status and resolution of their bug.

While TrueNAS encourages users to try out the early releases of TrueNAS SCALE Cobia and provide feedback, it is recommended to use TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.3.3 for cases where reliability and primary data retention are required. TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.4, which is planned for release in early October, will be the last major update for the 22.12 release branch. TrueNAS SCALE Cobia will gradually become the recommended version in Q4 2023 and beyond.

Users have the option to automatically migrate storage services and VMs from CORE to SCALE, and TrueNAS provides the ability to replace TrueNAS CORE Plugins and jails with Apps. For further advice or answers to questions, users can visit the TrueNAS Community Forums or Discord Channel.

Source: TrueNAS.

This tutorial will show you how to install netatalk on SmartOS. Netatalk is an open-source implementation of the Apple Filing Protocol, which used to be the default file-sharing protocol on Macs. It has since been replaced as the default file-sharing protocol on Macs by SMB/CIFS. Netatalk can be used to build your own NAS from commodity hardware instead of buying one, which is also an option. SmartOS supports AMD Ryzen and AMD EPYC CPUs since a while back, in addition to the long-supported Intel CPUs, such as the Intel Xeon.