 So I'm excited today because we're going to be reviewing this TrueNAS X10 box. Now I'm breaking the video up into two parts. This is going to be all about what TrueNAS is, how it differs from FreeNAS, the hardware that is the X10 system, and some of the unique features that it has and they go together hand in hand. So let's say you want to build a FreeNAS box, there's plenty of guides that I've talked about this before, and there's, you know, you can use it on consumer hardware, enterprise hardware, it's very diverse, it works on a lot of different platforms, but TrueNAS is, along with this box here, IX systems, got the shirt on today, they completely designed the hardware and the software together. So TrueNAS is a, not a fork of FreeNAS, it is a taking the best enterprise level features that are designed for the enterprise market, which this box is, and integrating them into this. So it gets developed alongside FreeNAS, they look at the highest availability parts, the most reliable parts of FreeNAS, such as a ZFS file system, and other features that are in it, and of course the interface a lot of us are familiar with the FreeNAS and integrate them in here. They don't integrate some of the things like, you know, the Plex plugin, because not as likely that you're going to be running Plex on this in the enterprise market, it's generally designed for high availability and redundant storage. But nonetheless, we're going to get into some of the details here, how the hardware works. Now this has dual motherboards and dual power supplies. And the motherboards are part of the genius of the way they did this. So they have two completely separate modules here, we're going to open them up and show you how this looks. And what it does is this is for failover. Now what's even more magical is how they've got both motherboards simultaneously talking to all the SATA drives, I'm sorry not SATA, SAS drives that are in here. So you have a row of SAS drives in here and both motherboards can see them at the same time and synchronize with each other. So this is a really neat feature of the way this is designed. So let's spin the box around and we'll start at the back and work our way to the front. The front's obviously pretty simple as where the drives go, but let's start at the back and show you what some of the magic is on this. All right so we got the box spun around and let's do a quick rundown of the ports. Now module A, module B, they're completely symmetrical. So we have two standard gigabit ports, two USBs, one installed with free NAS, I'm sorry true NAS, but this is the installer, not the one it runs off of. So you can run free NAS off of a USB and that's how a lot of people do it. Matter of fact it'll even support redundant USBs, but what they've done here is they have the installer and then inside here, when I show you inside they have it running on a M2 SATA. So we have the two USBs here, this is the out of band management port. So this for out of band management kind of looks like a headphone jack and so this connects to here and then here is the dedicated out of band port and once again it's symmetrical so you have this on both sides. Then we have your SASS externals, so if you wanted to use this as the head end and then plug in more drives and once again symmetrical over here, then you can connect to more drives. So this can be the head end, then you have several more boxes underneath of it with piles of hard drives inside of them and that's the configuration support about this dual expansion boxes are supported on this model. I believe some of the higher end models have even more expansion beyond that. So they shipped it to us with two RJ45 10 gigabit ports in here. This is your low profile card, it's essentially a PCIe, they have other configuration options you can get it with such as SFP plus. So once again contact your rep and they can get you the right ones. Now the hardware itself is really nicely put together and also if you don't want to use out of band over IP the IPMI they have a little spot right here where you can plug in a headphone jack and they give you a headphone jack with a USB on it. So this is so you can do your own console so you can plug into here and it's pretty long I think it's a four foot five foot cable here but if you didn't want to do IPMI for some reason this was in the box as well. Back to the hardware really easy to get to everything except one minor annoyance. If you're using cables that are like this with a little boot and a stopper right here so they don't eject easy I can get to the bottom of these fine but an IPMI I think it doesn't fit under here real well. I mean it's a pretty minor complaint you can wiggle it out but you know I guess I got to find something wrong because I'm so happy with it overall that's my one complaint I have is it's a little hard to get the network jack out of here but the reality is once you install these in your data center you're not likely to be pulling network cables out all day but just note you do that. Now it's because of the way this is recessed over and when you pull it out it's actually easy to get out too so generally once you plug these in like I said you're not unplugging and replugging. Now let's start with a power supply though about how it comes apart so you get this little orange lever here and we give it a push to release it and just as smooth as can be power supply will slide right out and they've got it well fitted so the power supply also contains the fans for airflow we have this here so we have air coming in through the front and then air coming in across the top here to create the airflow and that actually goes in to pull the airflow through the motherboard. The power supply's got nice guides on it really just it's heavy and efficient so these are well rated you know with modern equipment you really want efficiency because well electricity is you know not a cheap thing it's a big expense at the data center span with electricity so it slips in really nice so when you're pushing it in you can't just push the whole unit in there's a stopper hits right here and what that stopper does is keep you from just jamming it in wrong and then you slowly lever it up and fits in nice snug secure and clicks and locks so you can't accidentally release the power supply. Now on to the motherboard this is really cool too lift the lever I mean you could pull and you see it pushes on this lever a little bit but you lift this lever and pull these and it gently slides out the motherboard and the way it comes out now back to the venting you've seen on the power supply there's the venting here so the air comes through and pulls down and this right here prevents the air from getting pulled back in so it keeps nice directional airflow coming through the unit the hardware on this I mean this is well engineered it fits really well these little clips here these aren't plastic or chintzy at all this is really solid this is metal and so they have nice they have stops so they won't go too far so when you pull them out you don't have to try and find the sweet spot to slide this back in they come they hit they grab these little notches on each either side and it pulls it in the rest of the way and here's the connectors on the other side so once again metal guide here then all the connectors to connect all the buss and everything else also let's slide this out of the way the design itself is tool-less so to perform any upgrade functions press these two blue buttons like magic we're in inside the board itself let's turn inside we have your standard memory here we have our PCI card for the extra add-in for network so obviously it's you know a PCIe so it's easy enough to you know find other adapters for this I mean they're going to ship you with what you want but it's interchangeable so that if something goes wrong with this card they'll probably just send you a whole new module but it's modular itself we have the Intel processor under here this unit shipped with an Intel 1531 at 2.2 gigahertz so plenty of power if you're using this for encryption or anything else which I highly recommend using encrypted arrays that way when arrays go bad you don't have to worry about the date on them also if you can look down in here and I'm not going to remove anything I'm just demoing the hardware but right there we have an M2 SATA sand disk 128 that's actually what this boots off of is the sand disk and runs now they have the USB in here I believe just to reload it so that's probably got a copy of the operating system on there and then this is actually what it boots off of so you have a nice solid boot device inside of here that's pretty much the hardware inside here really nicely designed really clean and I like that it's just tool is just simple click and you're done when we slide back in it clicks and you're back in business it's really impressive to me how they've done the interconnects between these because both of them can see all the hard drives all the time for the high availability so you have this even if this fails and you have to get a replacement module there's not downtime to replace it it is made to be pulled out I was told you can pull them out live and it's not obviously recommended it's for emergency situations because of the amperage these use you could scar up the terminals if you did this frequently and hopefully with most time you know generally hardware doesn't fail that often these are all the just in case scenarios so let's spin it around and take a look at the hard drives so here's the drives in them and their standard nice trays slide out now the trays are not tool list there are screws holding the drives in but this is actually a preferred method because you want that precision and some of the tool is ones are cool but I've had to fiddle with them a little like you put them in you fiddle with the drive and then it goes in because they've got these on the side here the little tension clips so when these drives go in they're perfect there's no fiddling or moving them around now over here we've got SSDs in here so here's the tray for the SSDs and these are going to be for part of the testing where you will show you how you can set up a cash and a zill on these but this for the SSDs the trays slightly different to accommodate so the trays themselves are not universal and if you have blanks like you don't have a hard drive in here to keep the airflow universal you end up with a standard blank one which no holder for hard drive on it but that's so if you took one of these drives out or if you have a unit that you didn't order with all the drives filled they're going to come fill them with blanks that look just like the other ones and you have that on there so you also have a little writing tab right here so you can maybe put coordinates or information on there also right here these ones because they shipped them in separate boxes these ones also say HDD on them but then there's a spot here so we can see and put you know little stickers inside of here that's what these are is actually little sticker spots so pretty slick pretty clean looking interface on there plus they have the rows labeled zero three four seven eight eleven because the unit can tell you which drive it is and cross-reference that and then we have the lights over here on the side which it has a light to let you know if there's a problem and a green light to let you know that it's on now they also do ship these with rails and everything else so you can mount this and have it on a rail system that slides in and out that's also another option that comes with all right so let's get this thing powered on and I know what question people ask is how loud is it now ideally these are going to be in a data center probably not sitting next to your desk but on you know you may have concerns of just how loud and the really concerned is how many watts does it use so I have the trusty kilowatts now they rated their power supplies on the spec sheet they said they are 90 efficient I believe it because this thing is actually doesn't pull a ton of watts for how much how many hard drives and the build of the machine so let's get it plugged in I'm going to leave the microphone exactly how it is you can hear how loud it is and we'll talk about how many watts it's using so we started out 140 watts we just hit 300 watts for the spin up which you heard and now we're coming all the way down to 220 watts as is booting up so it's kind of settled on about 220 right now and we've let this plug in before when we were doing some set up testing with it and it seems to stay in the couple hundred watt range IBC a lot of the wattages pulled by the hard drives up here CPUs idle fairly efficiently and when they're not under high load high use but yeah it's not pulling a ton of watts right now so it's it's pretty reasonable on power maybe we'll do some testing when we put it under load to see how much that goes up when we're loading it up but I don't think you're going to see a dramatic change between them in the in the wattage for this other than when it's under full load with if these are not 15k drives but if you went all the way up to like 15k drives that you're really poor more wattage so you're going to see some of that actually it's now the should be checking the drives I can't see if they're starting to blink or not it just jumped up to like 260 watts enough about the power it's not the most fascinating thing about this but it's good to know that they've put some time into making very efficient power supplies on these uh another side note even with these drives running and all that not a lot of heat it does not uh it's not like sitting behind some of the other servers but we have an older server that we for one of our clients is like a blow dryer behind it all the time some of the older ones are very inefficient and uh they dissipate a lot of heat this is obviously really modern hardware so uh thermal concerns have been addressed in it okay so we talked about all the hardware and let's talk about what's different about the software now true nas versus free nas as I said this is a very optimized version of free nas specifically for the hardware so you have the people engineering the hardware working hand in hand with people designing this particular flavor of free nas now here's my free nas machine here's true nas free nas true nas logo is different a couple more options over here we're going to talk about that so it really has that familiar interface so we go to storage I have a storage pool said here we go to my storage I have a lot more storage pools but you get this idea they're very much the same as far as most of your functionality so if you are used to using free nas true nas is really not much of a learning curve but there's a few extra things in here so let's first talk about true nas being that it's enterprise designed with the enterprise if you work in that level you want really good support not just uptime uptime is a really big factor in deciding hardware but so is having support and this is something pretty cool that they've built in so before we get all the ha stuff we'll run across some of these tools here tunables they come pre-tuned this is something that you're going to get from the true nas people they enable the auto tune because they understand the hardware very very well and can optimize it specifically for the configurations that you're getting shipped so when you order it they build it they ship it it's all configured now a couple of notes here they do not ship it in ha mode I guess you could ask them to if you wanted to if you gave them the very specifics about your network but the way they shipped it to me was they shipped to me I got it on the network and then one of their technicians because you get a technician with this doesn't come in a box but it'll do remote support and help you you get one of their engineers to set this up so they were amazing I spent some time in a phone with them doing a lot of q and a and learning some of the details because I was you know want to dive in deep behind the scenes with this so I wanted to understand how it was working so I could share that with you so it shipped without ha and I got to watch the ha process now they like to help you with ha that's part of the package and please let them help you because you can make mistakes when you're doing this and put the machine in a non-bootable mode essentially the storage all that looks much the same but these have a couple different options so we have the two doubles and then we have over here the failover which is sync from pier sync to pier save set your timeout options these are to give some expanded options for your timeout between the two boards for failovers the defaults seem to work fine but they do have a couple clients with some really unique special use cases this is a really cool thing here and then enable automatic alert to ix system and it's just a checkbox based on the support level you have that's pretty cool and the reason this is nice is because yes you still get your notices here and you can still have an email you notices and all of the usual things that you have with free nas plus the proactive support and this they told me I said how does it work in production is always how I like to ask things and they said well we've actually called clients numerous times because you know as it people may have job hopped or changed the notice goes to an email address that someone didn't notice or bob is who got it before and now salie has the job and bob's email address is dead so then they don't get the notice when the problem occurs when you have this enabled they don't they get the notice and when they get the notice they're like hey drive xyz failed and we're ready to ship you out another one so that this proactive support if you don't have it people that are checking their emails and things like that they can get everything ready it automatically opens a ticket and they contact you and they're ready for the replacement so if you are on vacation as an it guy they're still working behind the scenes to help you and this is a really cool feature for these are proactive support and so their engineers have information on it as I said before it's this intel xeon cpud now here's a couple things about how ha works inside of here they're using the bsd carp system and by doing that I only ever have to change everything on this one virtual ip and I see virtual ip this is the ip that you want to attach all your shares to the ip essentially for the system but the way carp works there's more than one now you don't require any special networking hardware to have carp working so here's dot 245 here is 247 these are the individual nodes themselves and anything I change here or here because this is the active node which is why I can see it automatically syncs over to the inactive node because they use standby mode for ha so the two are powered up but it's only in so to speak a read only standby mode so it tells you the active ip tells you that it's on standby it tells you ha is enabled here so everything's ready this thing is ready to fly but it's not active and what happens is if this node goes down dot 245 it right now at about six second intervals it's checking so if this node's not up it immediately jumps over to the other node now side note if something goes really wrong in here they also will force a kernel panic to shut this one down and move to the other one used to remind me of the I think we used to pronounce it uh stoneth stoneth shoot the other node in the head which was from bail wolf clusters uh in earlier days of linux ha which was how you got rid of a rogue one you would just shoot it in the head as they used to say so I always thought that was kind of funny and that's with this uh with the networking and everything else it's watching for the network and the interfaces and determining whether or not this node needs to be up or if this node needs to be up so it's constantly checking but effectively you just do everything at one IP address and you don't have to know now you're going to get noticed if one of the nodes goes down you just aren't going to experience any downtime which of course is the ultimate goal so each one of these machines are sitting here now what about doing updates that's interesting I was asking about that and when you do the system updates first this the updates for this are not as frequent as they are for freelance they're very strongly tested they're very much more focused and only the enterprise level stuff so they're really highly focused on stability and a nice thing is when you're doing an update for this because it's their hardware they have you know each one of these engineers or have one of these in their lab so they're testing everything thoroughly before they send you the update so you don't have to worry about oh no will this update break anything I have because of some unique hardware configuration they do the testing internally for that but the updates work the same as they do but because you're running dual nodes when you run the update I'm actually updating the other node not this one and then vice versa it's going to switch back and forth between them and so you update each node it comes up and then you can do the switchovers so you can update with zero downtime and I think that's kind of neat if an update goes awry you'd only end up with one node down and so you could work on a solution to that versus you know taking the system down because of an update so I kind of like the way they did that the way it automatically does that so another question might came up might come up and this is something I found really clever as well so this h a journal file that's under the data folder is actually a journal of any changes you may make while the other node is rebooting so if I forced a node failure and then also while that node is in fail mode but rebooting it creates a journal of any changes to shares the storage controller anything you're changing inside of TrueNAS and what it's doing is getting ready to sync that so as soon as the other node comes up because here's all the changes and sync them that's what keeps the nodes in sync now that's also for some reason that doesn't work why they have this failover option where you can force the syncing going back the other way if you needed to I haven't done too much other than the general plugging unplugging stuff we're going to do a whole separate video showing the redundancy of this but I've never had to use the actual sync one and I have simulated some changes and like so we get into the failure mode reviews of this as a separate video I'll show you how that works but novel the way they did it now another thing you may notice here is I wonder how they talk to each other well I know it's a lot just dumped on the screen right here but I'll highlight the part that's interesting this is a network card the that mean you don't see so NTB so you have your IX and IGBs over here so we're going to go over to networking interfaces and there's those but what you don't have is the other one here that I'm showing because what these are and we did some speed test between here the NTB is a bus network for carp so it's actually not using to synchronize the two systems it's not using the interfaces that are on the back of it it has another internal interface for the two nodes to talk to each other this is rather clever and we did some speed testing and it's like a 40 gigabit link between there so it's really impressive just how much speed we got doing speed tests with IPERF between here and so that's how fast it can sync back and forth and this is also for handing off when a node fails it can hand off to the other node or especially when you're doing a control like an update you're handing off to the other node this is part of what makes that so fast and allows these both these controllers to stay in sync with all of the drives at once this is how the nodes talk to each other on the back end and I guess that's really important because you don't want the network interfaces in the back to be cluttered up with any of the management inner carp information it has to go back and forth between them so this is it's this comes preconfigured with the units this is how the units the sums talk to each other so let's get on some of the other differences now you probably notice let's go back over to my free NAS box so go here is there are jails I have in mind still from doing the upgrade there's a plugins option so we can plug in things and like I said you are missing some of that here you don't get all the plugins jails are not currently on the feature set that this has maybe it's something they'll add in the future but it's nothing to have right now generally in the enterprise market I mean this is a dedicated part of your storage sand and the back in your server office not something that you want to run plex on or a bunch of other plugins but when it comes to services for example most of those are the same dns domain controller iscazi ldap rsync still has s3 storage on here so you can have some of the amazon features smbs and pssh webdav and ups controls and the services and the sharing is iscazi windows webdav unix apple so you have the same feature sets there in terms of all the file functionality in true NAS just like you have in free NAS the active directory services and as you can see look the same between true NAS and free NAS so you still have the same functionality in there I also thought it was cool they left the wizard in both of them so you still have the setup wizard the setup wizard doesn't cover HA I was curious if it did it did not so that was the call to a tech to get that done now another thing they have is the vcenter plugin this is something rather new and it's not fully developed they've thrown it in here and seen how many of their clients really want to use it and they're going to do further development but what this actually will allow you to do is use vcenter to work directly with it so you can actually create the drives inside of vcenter instead of logging into the true NAS box and it will create the drives for you I believe it creates the iscazi luns for that not an expert is I don't run any of the ESX things so I'm not a vcenter expert but they said this is something they're working on developing they have it as a can create but cannot destroy drives which is probably good that way if anything goes wrong with the interface but this is an active plugin that they're working on that does come in here now side note about true NAS it has also been certified to work with both ESX Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix and server so they have done testing they did say the majority of their clients are running ESXi with this in the back end but they've done testing with these so once again when they take out of the code from FreeNAS they focus on these enterprise features and I believe they got some certifications that they've went through with these companies to make sure that they also are really good at support because they're supporting so many other companies if you're using one of those configurations they're really helpful at getting at helping you get that set up and of course like I said ESX being king and dominant of the virtualization world they're really familiar with that particular system and these are a really popular solution they have clients with petabytes of storage with these and you know no problems they work really well and it's a popular piece of hardware so I hope you enjoyed this introduction to the true NAS and kind of show you the difference between the true NAS and the free NAS and review of this true NAS X10 hardware the separate video is going to be us actually showing this in action so I can tell you all these cool HA features but we'll do separate videos that are just on showing how resilient the system is and tolerant to fault such and removing power supplies or even a node coming out of it while it's on and you know making sure the failover works and having machines attached to it so we can actually see the entire mode so if you like to content here like subscribe if you have certain questions post them in the comments below and also if you have some specific things you want me to test on this I'm more than happy you guys help inspire me to do some of these videos and give me suggestions for things you want to see your questions and concerns and we've got this thing for a little bit longer and we're going to be doing some of those tests all right thanks like the content here like and subscribe and appreciate it