 Tom here from Lauren's Systems and Trunascore 13.0 U3.1 was released on November 16th of 2022 and Trunascale 22.12 RC1 was released on November 15th of 2022 and today is November 22nd of 2022. I'll give you all the dates to kind of give context in case, you know, you're watching this in the future and YouTube has figured out a way to make it even harder to see the date the video was published. But honestly, what I want to talk about is that I'm using both of these. This video was recorded and edited on Trunascale and the backups were then sent over to Trunascore. I have a mix of different systems in our office and we'd like to do a lot of testing prior to me even doing a video about the releases that are coming out of the different versions of Trunascore. Now Trunascore, we're gonna talk about briefly because once it hit 13, it kind of just became stable. I know there's always been some little bug fixes now that it's all the way at U3 and then quickly from a little Samba Bug U3.1. Well, I would say it's very production ready. Now, I went right as soon as they came out to production with my Trunascore 13.0 so we could test it out. But for any of those hanging around on 12, and I even said this with the U2 and I'll just repeat it again. Now that we're in U3.1, yes, it's fully stable if you want to move to it. Now Trunascale, I'm a little ahead of myself on because this is a release candidate, not the full release of their new Bluefin. But I have been testing it so I want to talk about that because they gave it a facelift and well, I wanted to start testing it right away because I thought it looked cool and I wanted to play with the new features. So I have systems that are still running the other version of Trunascale, the release labeled stable. But I wanted to try at least on one of my systems, the release candidate one. And while I figure, hey, what about my video editing system seems like a good way to run through all the testing on that and see if it works before we dive into the details of video. Let's first are you an individual or company looking for support on a network engineering, storage or virtualization project? Is your company or internal IT team looking for someone to proactively monitor your system security or offer strategic guidance to keep your IT systems operating smoothly? Not only would we love to help consulting your project, we also offer fully managed or co-managed IT service plans for businesses in need of IT administration or IT teams in need of additional support. With our expert install team, we can also assist you with all of your structured cabling and Wi-Fi planning projects. If any of this piques your interest, fill out our Hire Us form at laurancesystems.com so we can start crafting a solution that works for you. If you're not interested in hiring us, but you're looking for other ways you want to support this channel, there's affiliate links down below to get you deals and discounts on products and services we talk about on this channel. And now back to our content. All right, so here are the release notes for Trunascore 13. Scrolling right down here to the software lifecycle. As I said, once it gets past U2, they consider it suitable for high uptime deployments in larger systems. And now that we're at U3, I would say it's considered commercially stable. I've been running it for a while without any issues and any issues I do have, I do make sure I report back. And nothing really to complain about here for our use cases. One thing of note, technically U3 came out on November 1st, 2022. And after Asamba Bug was found, there is a point release. The point releases are when something has to be fixed, but can't wait till the next full release. So if you experience any problems updating U3 and you specifically have this Samba problem, it was fixed in 3.1. Now, we'll scroll down here. And as I said, not a lot of changes here, but one of them I do want to talk about specifically. And that's going to be this ad store J as a cloud sync service. Now, this is both for core and scale. And I haven't really spent a lot of time digging into store J, but I do plan to because it looks really interesting. They are not the first people I've seen come up with a cloud distributed decentralized storage system where you can participate in it, as I understand it. But it's also the first time I've seen a really big organized way that it might be implemented. So more on this as I get around to doing testing it, I did sign up for my account. So you can send it for free accounts while they gave you some of the storage. It's encrypted prior to its send. Therefore, you don't have to worry about whether or not it's encrypted of where it lands because you're encrypting it before it leaves, which is always important with any of the cloud backups that you're doing. But as we move down the list here, there's a few more bugs in here. Nothing earth shattering, nothing groundbreaking, unless those bugs affected you. So read through these and see if any of these are ones that where things or reasons you are still hanging on to an old version of TrueNAS. Now, as far as the way the system looks, TrueNAS 13 U3.1 doesn't look any different. So UI elements haven't changed, the storage looks the same, functionality is the same. And as I said, we haven't had any problems with it. So I would say, hey, this is a great no brainer to upgrade to this version. But of note, and I've mentioned this before, we don't run any jails or plugins. This is strictly as a storage target. And that's all we use it for is as a storage target. TrueNAS Core 13 is pretty much our stable go to VM target for storage. Whether using XC PNG, VMware, or several other different hypervisor options, NFS shares or Samba shares. It's a great stable place to store all the storage. And I haven't really taken the time to review the latest release of scale to see if it's caught up with the performance that you get out of TrueNAS Core. Once the TrueNAS scale comes before release, maybe I'll do that testing and see if it's going to be substantially faster. The differences are there, but they're not substantial either in terms of performance. So I do have that video I did on performance on there. But with the other versions coming up at a time, it takes to set those up. I'm going to wait till a full release before I actually do that next level performance testing. So like and subscribe to look for that video. Now I'm moving over here to the 2212 Bluefin release notes. And by the way, this is a release candidate. So I'm getting a little ahead of myself in terms of using it, but I wanted to jump right on it to do some testing. And as I said, this video is recorded and being edited using this as the storage. So if this video comes out, then it works for storage. And it's done over a Samba share to keep it simple. But so far everything I've tested with it seems to work fine, including the ice because the issues I've had so far have been pretty much none with one minor exception and I'll leave a link to this. But essentially there is a bug that seems to be in the way the Kubernetes validates the host path. Don't ask me every detail because actually I didn't read it. I went and did this. I copied when I seen I was having the same problem as someone else and realized, hey, it's stuck deploying because of some type of ACL. And hey, there's me posting that, yes, this fixed sync thing for me and just more for my systems, applying glad to hear it fixed it. Basically, there's some permission. I don't know if it's exactly a permissions issue, but it's some type of safety on there. I actually didn't take a lot of time to read it, but I wanted to leave a link to the Reddit post that also has a link to a forum post where they kind of dive more into that particular topic. I believe this will be fixed in a full release but release candidate if you're having trouble getting some of your apps to start. It might be because of an ACL problem and this is the fix for it. But one of the reasons I switched is I wanted to see the web UI refactoring. I'm geeky like many of you following this and I get excited when you say web UI refactoring. You mean I get a new interface with more widgets to play with? Yes, we do. They actually did a really nice update on how they handle things. I'm really liking the new interface. I am hoping, and I don't know if this is true in any measurable way, that maybe some of these facelifts that they give on Trinascale will come back over to core. But I'll go over the interface here in a moment. New features they've added overlay FS support for Docker on ZFS. Special small block size data sets option that's inheritable. This is actually a pretty neat feature. If you're using a metadata set, you can decide the minimum block size to go to the metadata set on there. This can be helpful when you have, I don't know, 10 million memes that are like all JPEGs or PNGs and you're kind of small. And you want to index them fast and I mean literally 10 million. From doing that, you'll end up with faster performance, but maybe you don't want everything to be on that metadata drive. These are some of the options. And I believe Wendell has a video he's done on this under the title of special D devs. If I find a video, I'll leave it down below. Wendell's video from level one techs where he talks about how to do it and answer right up in his forums regarding, but hey, even easier, you have a button for it. So pretty neat that they're adding that. Like I said, a lot of new things going in here. Now I'm not going to dive into every detail here, but I do want to show you what that web refactoring is all about. And of course this is linked down below. So you can go through and read every little improvement in detail, see which ones are exciting to you. Now this here is the TrueNAS Scale 2204. So just in case people haven't seen it, this is what it looks like. And here's your data protection or here's your shares or what happens when you click storage. Pretty not that much different than TrueNAS Core. Little different because the menus are a little bit reverse ordered, virtualizations here. The apps are a little bit different. So nothing substantial. Let's move over though to what the new dashboard looks like. So if we click on storage, we're presented with this. And I've zoomed in a little bit. So in case things look a little funny, zoom in a little more, it's making it easier to see. So we have this kind of cool managed data sets. And this is really nice. Being able to see these and expand these down, pretty cool. So here's our synchronized offsite backups, LTS computer sync, next cloud bluefin test. And I went ahead and did make sure I test next cloud in here with the applications. I knew that would be something to ask, did next cloud work, did you set it up? Yeah, I didn't have any problems with it. I actually seem to install it perfectly fine. Getting that deployed. I'm still using sync thing. That's something more production that I do use. I need to do an update a video on it because a lot of feature enhancements on there. But this works fine. And the net data application works perfectly fine. Now, I'll eventually get around to adding some more app catalogs. But so far, I didn't have any problems with any of the official ones. This is the only catalog that I have in place right now with this particular system. But my overall feelings on it, I'm pretty happy. I'm impressed with how the production's going on this. They are actually really solidifying a lot of things. Now, I did have some complaints before, which are still valid. There's still no native built into here, I should say. Way you can easily just back up a virtual machine or back up a application that you install or the reinstall process, that's still buggy, but the people over at Truecharts are working on some of that. So I mean, in the future, I have a video where I kind of break down to make sure people understand where their data is going. And not this, you know how to deploy something, but you know how to redeploy it and have all of your data stay intact. That's one of those really important things to me. And Sync Thing was the example I gave of working perfectly fine. And it still does here in the latest version of, hey, all I have to do is point Sync Thing to a dataset and say, this is where your data lives. And I can reinstall, stop and rebuild Sync Thing anytime I want. And the data always lives in a place that is knowable, that is easily backed up. Now, as far as the virtualization goes, I've actually been testing that with both scale, the later release and the latest RC and it works perfectly fine. I even built another MinIO server for another video that I'm working on, but I haven't had any problems with the virtualization. Actually, it's been to work very well. Now, people always ask, does it make a good virtualization server? It's an okay virtualization server. You know, we do have an option to display, go and download logs or delete, but you notice what's missing here, it doesn't have the ability to live migrate to other virtual machines. It doesn't have any easy way to just export this as like an OVA file or import OVA file. So while it works as some basic virtualization, it's handy because it's here. It's not the same as a full blown hypervisor like VMware or XCPNG, couple popular ones out there that we're often using TrueNAS as a storage target for. So to kind of wrap things up, the final question I do wanna answer is TrueNAS core or TrueNAS scale? Which one should you be using? And it comes down to what you wanna do with it. As I said, our core system is still where all of our virtual machines live. It's still a storage target via Samba and NFS for just all the things that are going on at my office and lots of the data we need to have. TrueNAS scale, great for running applications. I have a couple of scale servers and obviously one of them that I'm not only using for storage and editing video, but also using things like syncing on. And I don't see a problem with any of the applications. The ones that I've gotten running on there seem to be quite stable and it survived the update, which of course is the big question of when you update it in place from the TrueNAS stable release to the release candidate that it explode? No, it seems to be perfectly fine. So I haven't had a problem there. Now, when will I upgrade core and then drop that old free BSD system? Well, that's comes down to performance because TrueNAS core is still my go-to for stability and performance. I'm gonna stick with it for probably a little while longer and probably as long as we're still selling them. And yes, we're an IX systems reseller and we just sold several more systems to some clients that need it for high availability and need the virtualization storage target for their VMR cluster. So yeah, we're gonna keep a few core systems at my office always for testing and keeping up with the client things. But as far as scale, if you're in the home lab and you like all the applications that you can run on there or you wanna check out like adding extra catalogs from TrueCharts to it so you can have even more applications, having all of your applications on your NAS, it's a NAS first, but having some of those extra apps might be pretty handy. So I think it might be something for especially the home lab people or someone who wants to condense a lot down to a single box is still a great system for that. Go ahead and try out the release candidate as long as you're willing to bug report and understand that it's a release candidate. If not wait till the full version comes out, the full bluefin version will be out roughly sometime in December of 2022, depending on codes and bug fixes. But nonetheless, I think it adds up today is when they go feature release, like they lock it down, say no more code changes other than bug fixing from here out so they can get the release out. But hey, check out all the developers notes. Participate in the TrueNAS forums. It's a great place to kind of see what's going on. That's the wonderful thing about open source development. You can read through the tickets, you can read through the thoughts of the people in there. You can read that Reddit post because Chris Moore, one of the heads of the development over at TrueNAS, I would say the head of development for spearheading these projects is engaging with people on Reddit and in the forums. So that's always where you can kind of gain better understanding, figure out how this thing is going. And honestly, that is mostly what I do is interact and poke around and read a whole lot so I can bring these videos to you. Like and subscribe and all that fun stuff. Thanks for watching. See you next time.