 Tom here from Orange Systems, and we're going to talk about the TrueNAS M50. We did the hardware, now it's time to talk about the software. If you want to learn more about me or my company, head over to LawrenceSystems.com. There's a hires button at the top where you can hires for projects. If you would like to learn about helping this channel in other ways, head down below for the affiliate links, and there's offers and discounts for products and services we talk about that help out the channel and give you a discount. All right, TrueNAS and the software within it. And for those of you who go, Tom, didn't you just start this video and are you re-uploading it? I'll cover that real quick. I made some mistakes. I care a lot about accuracy. So after reviewing the video and finding a couple of things that I was just not completely right about, I decided to redo the video. So for those of you wondering what happened to the previous one, it got deleted and went to the bit bucket in the sky. All right, so let's dive into the TrueNAS platform here and talk about first how it differs from FreeNAS. Really what you get with TrueNAS, and I've covered the hardware on this, and this is a beast of a system, run down real quick here. This is the TrueNAS M50 with the dual controllers. And as you can see, 256 gigs of RAM and 63 terabytes of available space right now. It's absolutely built out really well. It's got some 10 gig connections, not connected at 10 gig at this very moment. That'll be some later videos just because of way it's setting up in my studio right now, but does have capability of going all the way up to a 100 gig connection. And just a whole lot of great features inside of here. But one of the things I want to talk about is specifically, let's start with how does it compare to FreeNAS? So obviously FreeNAS, you can download and build your own hardware, and a lot of people do. And IAX systems does have FreeNAS preloaded systems. And they do that so you can have something that's turnkey out of the box, you know it's compatible and works without a problem. TrueNAS goes a step further because not only do you get something turnkey out of the box, you don't have to worry about specking the system. IAX systems helps you with that process or resellers like myself do help you speck out the system and build it. And this is where TrueNAS comes in, especially comes with that support contract. Now they sent me this system configured like this for these demos. The only downside is I have to send it back. It's been fun playing with it so far. But when you get into the differences, the nice thing is all the videos I've done on FreeNAS and talking about it, especially this latest version, the 11.3 release, are now the same as they are in TrueNAS. Now what TrueNAS does as a rule, they stay a little bit behind. So 11.2 is when we first see the interface change. And TrueNAS always does things a little bit more cautious would be the way I would describe it. And that's because in the enterprise market when you want absolutely positively no downtime when you're doing things, it's just real expensive to have downtime. They always err on the side of caution, so to speak. So the FreeNAS release comes out, bug reports come out. They see if there's anything major, nothing major. And then the FreeNAS code base gets pushed over to the TrueNAS world. And so it's generally a little bit behind. So now TrueNAS has this new interface. And you're probably going to notice it does say alpha over here. That is because as of today in February 3rd, 2020, it is not completely released to the public for the, or even the TrueNAS people, not really public because it's not something you can download. It is not fully released yet, but will be very shortly. So that's why they set me up with this as a preview version. So if you were to order one, it's probably going to be coming with this on there. But for those of you that have it, this update has not been available yet. I don't think for any of the TrueNAS line of systems. But when it comes to features, for the most part, when you go and we'll just pull it out like this for a side by side, you can see that FreeNAS and TrueNAS have the same menus. So we look at the menus over here, scroll down a little bit. Pretty much the same thing on both sides. Now, where things differ a little bit is in the plug-ins. So if we look at the plug-ins right here, we see the IAC system plug-ins and the community plug-ins, but when we're doing that over here, I just go over plug-ins, we only have the IAC system ones. And the reason for that is because in the enterprise market, you want to be a little bit more cautious. So you're not necessarily just running Plex on your enterprise storage server. Now that is possible because you can just create a custom jail if that was what you wanted to do. I imagine you can create some custom jails in there, but generally speaking, you keep your application servers and your storage servers separate. And this acts as a back-end sand for your storage server. So all the features that, like I said before, talked about with FreeNAS are all built into TrueNAS as far as that. But the exception's really being the community-supported plug-ins aren't in there, and they haven't included all of these. I imagine more of these are going to come in there. So I believe the jails are the newest for only this version. And well, I should say the plug-ins that run inside the jails. So you're going to start probably seeing a few more plug-ins. I don't have the full list of everything to be on there. But of course, as clients demand for different things come up, I'm sure they will be in there. I've seen one of the important ones they have is, like, the Seeker backup icon link. And of course, NextCloud. A lot of enterprises are running NextCloud. It's becoming very popular. So this is going to become a more popular plug-in that we'll probably see more of and a few others on there for people that want to host it. And of course, this server plenty fast enough to run NextCloud on, of course, at scale. Now, the other thing that's going to differ from FreeNAS is the high availability. So that is not something that you can really just add to FreeNAS. And I say that because the M50 system is specifically engineered and other ones that they have that are in this category with the dual controllers. And these dual controllers, both talk to all the hard drives at once. They do it not in an active-active, but an active standby mode. And what this allows it to do is have absolute seamless failover. And that's really important. And caveat said, of course. So let's talk about the failover. So they're using Carp. And Carp creates a virtual IP address between the two servers. So the servers each have the two servers as in the two controllers inside there, which are two separate motherboards. Each have their own IPMI. They each have their own TrueNAS software loaded. And each of them is physically in one box, but talking to all the drives. And then we have the virtual IP between them, the VIP. And I've covered this before when I've talked about PF Sense and HA. With the common address redundancy protocol provides high availability failover. So I'm connected to the 2.50, but the active server is actually assuming that address. If this server, either because I unplug it, if I initiate failover, or through catastrophe of absolute failure, this takes over. Not like HA, and there's a pause and a delay, but like HA as in immediately. And this is a quick view of how that controllers and how they slide out the back. And I covered this in-depth more in the hardware. If you're using, for example, iSCSI or NFS V4, the others do failover, but connections may be disrupted. But with the iSCSI NFS V4, it's instantaneous. And this allows, so we'll go ahead and show a little bit of how this works, so I'll kick something off here. I think I have, there we go. So I'll run some IO stuff on here. It's creating some files and creating some rewrite. And this is a Debian server running on XCPNG, which by the way, Trunias is certified with Citrix and certified with VMware. But by extension of being certified with Citrix, it works fine with XCPNG. No problems on there. That's what this is running on. You set it up just like you would for a Citrix Zen server. Just this is the XCPNG Zen server. And you can see it's doing some stuff. We got some writing going on. So let's log into the machines. And right here. So when we look at it, you see there's load on this one, not much. I mean, we're not pushing too much data across it. It's hard for me to stress that it's great configuration. So you can see this one's loaded, this one's not. They don't load balance. That's why I wanted to bring up that the two controllers inside of there, one's active, one's backup. That's why this one has a little bit more load on it. This is the one actually seeing the activity for that VM that I have set up running on here, using this backend storage through an ISSCSI, which is why you see the middleware being used here, but not much here. So slightly more usage on this one showing a little bit of processor usage. No big deal there. Also, there's gonna be some future videos where I show how the failover works. Actually, we'll simulate failovers and show that, well, there's no disruptions to the VMs running with ISSCSI attached to this as their storage. It's really impressive how that works. Now, getting back onto the system itself, look over here, users, groups, system, all the same things that you're gonna see on your pre-nast system. Get down here though to support. This is a little bit different. You have the true NAS support and the failover options. This is the integration so we can contact them. You can have notices sent from this system to them for support. So they can get a drive out to you if a drive fails or any of those notices. These are a couple of the differences that really make this stand out. And it's one important aspect if you're in the enterprise market. Someone may want a series of storage controllers or let's say you build this out completely with the different expanders that you can buy and you build an entire max capacity like 10 petabytes of storage. You kinda wanna make sure there's support and someone you can talk to if there's a problem in setting up or configuring something at that scale. And that's what you get with the true NAS system. By other hardware comes a support. Comes a support agreements related to all that. Now, one thing I also wanna be clear is 100% of this is compatible with FreeNAS. So if you wanted to have this be the main critical system that runs things but then also tie in FreeNASs to do things like the replication, that's not a problem. So if you go over here to tasks and this is something that's really efficient with ZFS is being able to set up replication tasks to replicate the changes. It's very, very fast. It's way faster than even our syncing things. You can mirror this to other systems that aren't true NAS. It'll mirror to true NAS, it'll also mirror to FreeNAS. So I just wanna make that, you know, make sure it's clear so if you, you're not getting any type of vendor lock-ins when really trying to make sure it's clear that if you get the true NAS system but you wanna have or maybe you have an existing stack of FreeNAS systems, they have no problems working with each other at all. Now, another cool feature we'll talk about is how these system data sets are viewed inside of here. So let's go ahead and view the enclosure. This is really cool. Once again, the integration you get with IAC systems writing all the software and designing the hardware together is you can see what belongs to which pool. And with ZFS, this is built out with several different VDEVs tied to different pools. So we're able to not only, you know, click and identify a drive, we can see which grouping they belong to for each one of these. So let me go over here to the storage, pools, status. And you can see that we have each one of these VDEVs. So we have one, two, three, four VDEVs tied to this. And by looking at them, we're able to see which one of these drives, DA0P2, DA14P2, et cetera, in the enclosure and see which ones are tied to it. And then I've got these three at the top. I called it just a three tank. There are three SSD drives that are just sitting at the top of this. So those are grouped together like that. So no matter where you put the drives or where they belong, because ZFS doesn't necessarily rely on physical location of the disk, it looks at the pool itself to determine what drives belong to what VDEVs belong to what pool. So if you move these around, they will also move around inside of here. So just something I wanted to note that is really cool. So it's not hard finding drives. And this obviously is a problem. You want to make sure you have very clear understanding of before it becomes a problem. Especially when you talk about adding several more shelves to this, it becomes a pretty big deal to find out which drive is going bad. And it'll alert you and tell you, and we'll do some probably demos when I pop drives out and things like that when we're doing some of the torture testing on this. It also understands the temperature sensor, voltage sensors, power supplies, to let you know if there's any problems with PS1 or PS2 status on there. So back over to the dashboard. Now the way the car works as well, there's also internal syncing going on. So you have the external syncing and then you have internal syncing going on. And that's kind of why there's a little pause. It looks, it checks the status of the backup controller. This does allow you to initiate upgrades while running production. And this is an advantage of having active standby. You will update a system. And then of course, when you update the new version, it needs to reboot. You can then initiate the failover when you're doing this process and it immediately will take over without disruption. So now it's not a big deal to do the firmware updates while things are running and while things are moving in the system. Now a few other features on here, active directory. This is really cool because they have the active directory built in here. And with the new version of FreeNAS, there's been a lot of retooling involved in terms of the permissions. This is obviously something I'm gonna do it on FreeNAS, but of course it applies to here. I'm gonna do some more permission videos because a lot of people have asked. I've been waiting for the 11.3 when I retooled it. Makes it a little different. In some ways makes it a little easier, but I wanna make sure people get the concepts down when I do that video. But yes, you can tie this to a Windows domain. No, this doesn't really act as a domain controller, but it ties to a Windows domain to hand off the permissions. And how does that permissions look? Well, now they've added, go down here, Storage, Pools, and we're gonna go ahead and edit the ACLs. And you can see that there's a lot more in-depth on the access control list. Now, also related to this, the new default for sharing. I'm gonna go ahead and look at the Windows share on here. If we were to add a Windows share, enable Shadow Copies is enabled by default. Now, this is really slick because you're enabling Shadow Copies as a VSS client. So what this does is instead of using Volume Shadow, which is the Microsoft way of doing it, it presents to the Windows share. So the Windows machine's attached to this. You know, the end users themselves can see them, but they're actually based on snapshots inside a ZFS. And they're also immutable. So what that means is unless that user has root access to this particular machine, and hopefully you're not setting it up that way, that would be terrible, but you have the FreeNAS machine creating snapshots or TrueNAS. And those snapshots then get presented so they can have previous versions of their files based on the snapshot times you'd set up on here. But if something tragic were to happen to that Windows machine, its permissions to those drives would maybe allow them to, I don't know, ransomware, delete files or whatever. The snapshots in VSS can't be messed up because they're actually being virtually presented to the system. So you still have that as a backup per se to make it easy so the end user can still do it, but also the end user or anyone who accesses their machine or even a threat actor who access it to do something bad does not have access to go around deleting all of that. So I really like that they've added this by default and it's a nice integration. I think I did this in my FreeNAS beta video and I'll be diving deeper into it when I talk about my, when I do my Windows video on this. And like I said, this is gonna apply both to FreeNAS and TrueNAS. So I'm gonna cancel on that right there. Now another thing is when you wanna present this and there's a couple of different ways you can present storage to a system. And if you wanted to use this as the backend for Windows, let's say you have a Windows server and you wanna add a very large storage controller to the, our storage system to it, you can always present it as iSCSI. I've done a video on this even showing how I presented iSCSI to my Windows machine for well storing all my Steam games for my son. This works really well. And this works in the enterprise market because now instead of relying on any permissions in here you're just doing it inside of Windows. So any of the Windows features you want because it's presented as a block device to Windows or whichever you're applying it to, that's another way to do this. And then you snapshot the different Z-Viles you create for the iSCSI. Now the iSCSI in this case has also the wizard that came in the 11.3 version of FreeNAS has now been brought over to this version of TrueNAS as well to make iSCSI a little bit easier for you to set up. And they have here the, if you wanna set up for VMware, a ZenExtend block. So that the Zen server, which like I said, Citrix and XCPNG, legacy OS, modern OS, depending on the type of 4K, TPC enabled, Zen, compatible remote, SSD speed, et cetera. So you got some features in there. And of course after you create it, you can always fine tune it to whatever works for you. So let's dive into some of the services that are on here. Once again, paired up the same as FreeNAS. So if you're familiar with FreeNAS, they're the same. If you're not, we have iSCSI. Great way to present to virtual systems such as in the case I have set up here, I have it tied to my Zen server so we're running one virtual machine just for testing to prove it works on this iSCSI. But of course, some people prefer to do this over NFS that support it as well. We have R-Sync and we have S3, which if you wanted to create, this is a S3 object storage and you want something S3 compatible. And let's say you're running some type of application. Normally, you may wanna connect to different S3 options but what if that S3 option is also maybe something that you want to run locally? Well, you don't have to retool your application that's designed for S3, you can stand this up as an S3 and have that locally running here. That's a really nice feature in there. And some people have these set up because they wanna run Michigan Critical in here and then just replicate it elsewhere to places that might be more expensive hosted in a cloud. But this gives you that option. We also have SMB, your Windows File Sharing, SSH in here, WebDAB, UPS Support and SSH. And a few other things like LLDP, FTP, which I hope no one really needs to use it but they did leave it in there for now so that's definitely a thing. And they do have the Apple File Sharing, AFP. Now, when it comes to reporting, no, there's not a lot of in-depth reporting on the system. I wish it had a little bit better maybe. These aren't bad, they've definitely improved. Over time, this is where it's not bad, not the best. But I haven't had any time to test this. This is where they're working on this. And once you start getting into having several free NAS servers and things like that where you wanna start looking at the performance overall, they do have this right here. I've not done a video review of this yet but it's pretty cool and it's on my to-do list which is the trueNAS true command. And this works with even a mixed combination of both trueNAS and freeNAS systems that you can tie together, tie them all into one dashboard so you can have a single sign-on for all your NAS unit, customize alerts and reports, fault management diagnostics, et cetera, analytics, et cetera. So you have all this tied together to one dashboard. I do like that they have made a product that kind of fills in that gap. I just wish still it had better reporting internally on here. And I say that because some people say what happened to net data? There was some memory leak problems they found with net data running on BSD. Therefore, it's been removed from the freeNAS project and didn't make it into the trueNAS product. This is probably an example of things because I know of it never existed in trueNAS and now that it's been removed from freeNAS because of the memory leak issue, well, that's here. And when it comes to the data center stuff running enterprise, they don't reboot it too often to deal with the memory leak they don't want to. Even if that is HA, generally not what you want to have to do. So that is missing on there. So they've added virtual machine support in trueNAS and I like the fact that they've added it but I will admit one thing about the freeNAS and how virtual machines work with the Beehive system, it's, well, it's just not as robust as other VM products out there. But if you have a basic use case and you need a guest operating system that's gonna run right on the same hardware because you wanted to access it very, very fast and there may be limited space and data center and you just have this one little thing that needs to run on there and you want it to run right inside of here. Yeah, it's pretty good. It doesn't have all those fancy features you have with a more advanced VMWare, XCPNG, Zen server or many of the other ones out there but it will get the job done if you want to have a Windows Linux or FreeBSD. It's got some basic options on here, does support UEFI boot, several other features. So we're gonna go ahead and run through real quick here. You can set the memory, as long as you don't set it more than there. Plenty of CPUs in this, we'll give this one four CPUs next. And of course, this is where the advantage is being able to have one of these Z-Vols and there's nothing in between. You're running Beehive in the processor, virtualizing it and giving you really fast access to the systems that are running on here. So it's gonna be really fast, the fact that you're not connecting to it externally through a storage. So I like to say that I like they added it. I like that it's in here for some limited use case but I would not consider moving like an entire large stack over to it for virtualization. It's kind of more of a specific use case when you want things running on there. And I've said the same with FreeNAS, this is just a true NAS thing, FreeNAS true NAS are both good systems, they're solid but this little feature right here, it's a lot more basic. So if you're looking for a full blown advanced hypervisor, a lot of features, they're not really there yet and I'm not sure that they're gonna develop it all the way into that. Now a few other notes of things that are in here is it does have the ability for alerting services to run. And alert settings. So you have some options in here, AWS email, influx, matter most, open genie, page duty, Slack, SNMP trap. These are obviously important because if you have any problems you want it to notify whoever's in charge of monitoring all those problems. So they give you a few different ways of more than just email to get these notices over to you. So that's important and of course they give you a lot of details on how exactly, do you wanna be notified immediately, maybe a little later, hourly, daily, never, et cetera on the different triggers. So there's a lot of fine green filtering can have in there. Now we do also have the cloud credentials. So once you've put all this data and built out this large system, maybe you have to store it to another system. It does have the ability to tie into commercial services like Amazon S3, Backlice B2, Box, Dropbox, FTP, Google Cloud Storage, and a few others are in here, Azure Blob Storage, OneDrive, SFTP, or Yandex. Now once again, like I said in the beginning, you could also set up another off-site replication job to be sent to even another freelance system that's at another location for replication. That's a little different than setting it up here. These cloud credentials are more aimed at some of the commercial services, with obviously the exception being some of the more common protocols that are optioned in there. But my overall, it's a really impressive system. It works great for doing this failover and things like that. I like the way it's all enabled on there. One little side note that I learned, maybe when I'm doing some testing, you find out things the fun way, when if you have no storage arrays set up at all, you have to wipe all the drives. While you're doing it, you really should disable HA. It does need a system to talk to so all things stay in sync or they can get out of sync with each other. I found out there's some problems you can create. It's really simple to turn on and off to HA. So right now, HA is enabled. You can just go in the dashboard, I'm sorry, under system, and then you just check the box on the failover to disable it if you don't want it to do that. They also do have that option to sync back and forth from peer or to peer. If you ever have a controller that gets out of sync or if it gets damaged and goes into the HA mode and fails over, because one of them dies. When you put the new one in, you can just sync it right over there and push all the settings back to get them right back on track and back in HA. Now the last thing I'll do to end this video is initiate a failover. So we're gonna go back over here to that VM. We see it doing some stuff and it's not gonna run real fast. Like I said, this is not connected at very high speed. I just connected across the one gig of the network. So it gets a few stats, but it's not going to be nothing incredible here. Let's go over to the storage. True NAS. So yeah, because it's running across this one gig connection a little bit of latency, but we see some data flowing back and forth right here. I'll wait. Now the important thing is with the VM. So we'll go back over here and it's running. Nothing incredible, I don't expect it to be, but we're gonna go ahead and initiate that failover though. So initiate failover, confirm. Waiting for active True NAS controller to come up. Now what it did was, there's IP that was being used by the active controllers got released and used over there. The iSCSI is connected via, let's go over here, storage. And you look at the True NAS SCSI. I think it tells me the IP address in here. There we go. There's the 192.683.50. So as far as my controller is concerned inside of my Zen server, it's always gonna talk to 15 no matter what's going on over here and the failover. It'll take a second to do this from my end in terms of logging in because I wasn't logged into the other controller. It doesn't sync the logins. I was logged into the first controller and initiated failover. But what I wanna point out that's incredibly important, this had no idea it happened. So this is still running. Test is still running perfectly fine. It's, matter of fact, our iObsters still flowing. We didn't drop any. We didn't lose any data. It keeps working perfectly fine. That's the important part with that seamless failover. And I'm gonna do a little bit deeper dive into it about how the failover works and show what happens when you just unplug things while they're running. Of course, creates some worst case scenarios. So I'm gonna set this up for some performance. This has some 10 gig connections. I have some 10 gig connections. When I move everything in my lab, I'll tie it all together to show the demo a little better, running multiple virtual machines on the system or on my Zen server tied to via iSCSI and I'll do a test with NFS as well and have them running at the same time and just show that it works perfectly fine. So this keeps running along. Let's go see. There's the login ready for me. And now we're on, if you were paying attention to names, this one's called the Loch Nass 2. The other one's Loch Nass 1. And then it shut this one down when I initiated failover. It actually went in a shutdown mode on there when I did that. No big deal. The important part is the virtual machines are running. Now, side note is when it does this, the ZFS cache, because these read rights are happening over here, it does drop the memory cache that was going. But that's not a big deal because what happens with ZFS, if you lose a cache drive or a piece of cache memory, it looks for it when that can't be found. It just grabs it back from the drive. So there is maybe a temporary, not really pause, but spin up time where we're pulling stuff out of the drive and caching it again. But users are just, they're not seeing this. They see the system still up and running, still available to them. All the, you know, ISCSI extents are completely shared. And in the case of SMB, yes, that does have a little bit of a pause like they mentioned in the documentation, but not that big of a deal. Because well with SMB, they can survive small pauses. When it comes to things like virtual machines running over ISCSI or NFS, you do not want any pauses or any potential loss of data when that happens. Because well, that can mean losing a massive amount of database transactions. That could mean a lot of bad things happening in the business. But this is my review of this concluded here. And if you have questions, comments, post them over to forums, leave some comments in this video. However you want to try to communicate forums where you can have a more in-depth discussion on this topic. But my next video I'll be doing on this will be some different testing of the different plugins on it. And of course some torture testing, which I know everyone looks forward to. And I certainly do myself of watching what happens when you unplug things. I gotta ask the team there if I can slide out a motherboard live. They'd let me do it on the last server. I don't know if they'll let me do it on this server or not, but I'll be diving into those later. All right, and thanks. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to see more content from the channel, hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon. If you'd like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out. 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