 Time here from Orange Systems. And in February of 2022, TrueNAS Scale was released by iSystems. And since it's released, there's been, of course, a little bit of confusion. I've seen people tagging me on Twitter and asking questions and forums and my YouTube channel here, comments. And their questions are valid. Which one should I go with? There's a little bit of misinformation out there, because apparently a lot of people asked if TrueNAS Scale was the paid version of TrueNAS Core. I don't know where that information came from, because I Googled and confined it. But nonetheless, both are open source, both are free. And what I wanted to break down in this video is now that TrueNAS Scale is released here in March of 2022. We also have TrueNAS Core 13. It's in beta right now, but I'm excited about that because there are now two platforms by iSystems that have a lot of similarities, a few differences, and they're both being actively developed. And it adds to the confusion of which one should you choose? Well, that's why I want to help decipher in this video, is give you the information and the differences and similarities between them so you can make an educated choice of which system works for you. Or in my case, both because I have a servers with both on there so I can do all the testing and everything in my lab. So that's my recommendation is to use both, but that's not always reasonable. I get it. You want to pick one and load it on your server. Before we dive into all those details, if you'd like to learn more about me and my company, head over to lauranceystems.com. If you'd like to hires for consulting, such as storage consulting on TrueNAS servers, there's a hires button right at the top. If you want to support this channel in other ways, there's affiliate links down below to get you deals and discounts on products and services we talk about on this channel. As with many projects, the first great place to start is in the documentation. You know, a little RTFM here. And they've got it all laid out here, what the differences are. We have the TrueNAS core, TrueNAS scale, and in the middle here we have TrueNAS enterprise. Now, this is because they do offer support contracts. If you would like to purchase a upgraded level of support, this is something that is really important in the enterprise. And this is well used in the enterprise, by the way, we've deployed this and everything from medical to industrial to even some automotive companies have chose to use TrueNAS for their storage. And any large enterprise company frequently wants the support packages to be available to them. And this is something they can do. It's the same software. Now, there is a slight nuance difference. If you get the IX systems and their high availability systems with TrueNAS core, I've reviewed these on my channel before. The hardware itself has a special version of TrueNAS core to provide real time failover. This is an integration of hardware and software together. So yes, it's a slightly specialized version because it has the same functionality as your normal TrueNAS system with these add ons to do the interaction with the hardware for HA failover. I'll leave a link to that video if you're interested in where I actually remove a live running motherboard because yes, it can survive a motherboard failure and still remain up. All right. Now, before we get off topic, let's start talking about the differences between core and scale. Now, as I said, they're both projects maintained by IX systems. They're both open source and free. They both use ZFS. Now, ZFS is an amazing file system. I've made jokes and of course, have a shirt on my store now that says I'm part of the cult of ZFS because yes, I'm a fanboy, but it's a well vetted, well developed file system. And it is still the underlying file system, whether you go with TrueNAS core or TrueNAS scale. They didn't change any of that. You can also use one of the wonderful features of ZFS, ZFS replication, which allows you to essentially back up to another ZFS pool that can be on another server. And the interoperability is both ways. You can even use the same wizard in either one of them to have a TrueNAS scale system copy over to core or vice versa. So the interoperability is still there. They both support SMB, NFS, S3, and iSCSI. That's all the same features that you expect out of a normal NAS. So from a functionality of NAS, they're pretty much the same there. But this is where there's some similarities, but differences and it comes down to we'll start with containerization. They both offer containerization, but TrueNAS core is BSD-based like the operating system itself is based on pre-BSD and they use IO cage for jails and be high for virtualization. TrueNAS scale is based on Debian. So you have a combination of Kubernetes, Docker, and KVM for VMs. So the containerization virtualization platforms with them are very divergent. This means if you're doing a migration, which is probably the most accurate term as opposed to an upgrade from TrueNAS core to TrueNAS scale, because you go, I would rather use that Kubernetes environment, the Docker and KVM, this is more in line with what I want. Great. With the exception of there's not a way to redo your IO cage built jails and TrueNAS core and build them over, you have to rebuild them. Now, if you're doing things and you're doing containerization, I should say, in exactly the right way, your data is important, but the container itself is essentially ephemeral and meaningless. You can just rebuild it on the fly and reattach your data to it. This is good implementation of containers where all my data is here, the container needs an update or need to replace it or something went wrong with container, you just rebuild the container and reattach it to your data store. That concept works both ways, but the container itself, of course, is different between these platforms and there's no way to just translate a container because one's built with free BSD and one's built with Docker with Debian. So yeah, there's a big difference between the two of them there. Now, the next thing that TrueNAS scale is really focusing on is the fact that they have clustering and they have that right here under pages as deploy is a single node or a cluster. And as it says right here, open ZFS and Gluster combine to enable scale out ZFS capabilities with excellent data management, deploy a single hyperconverged node, any home office or cluster of nodes together for a high scalable and high availability software to find infrastructure. Now, Gluster FS is one of the reasons a lot of people are excited about scale in addition to the Docker and Kubernetes things. Gluster effects architecture aggregates compute storage and IO resources into a single global namespace. What this means is you're defining the storage in TrueNAS scale, you're still loading ZFS and using TrueNAS to be able to configure it and then you'll configure Gluster. And then that Gluster will have a node and each node is an individual computer. So individual server, if you will, that's running scale. So Gluster is adding a layer of complexity, but for the benefit of being able to have more than one scale server. So if you say I want to have three scale servers, four scale servers, you'll take whatever you're targeting at Gluster, whether that's SMB, or you're using it as a storage target for your virtualization, and you want to add more nodes, you simply add them without redefining Gluster or how it's seen by the different targets that you have attached to it. This makes it a really interesting and, as the name implies, scale out system. So you can build resiliency with Gluster, you can add more storage. There's different ways to configure it on the back end. You can almost think of each scale server depending on how you define them within Gluster. If you want to define them for more storage or greater performance, depending on how you set them up, you can almost look at them individual drives, even though they're their own system. This is popular for some of the really large architected systems. It's not as much targeted, not that you can't use it at home, but it's less ideal because you're adding a layer of complexity for home users, but it's still really cool. Now this system is still very new. I will probably do some video about it in a future, but right now it's a very new, not completely finished product in there. And it's also going to be controlled by the TrueNAS, TrueCommand system. This is where you're actually going to manage not only your TrueNAS core systems, TrueNAS enterprise systems, or TrueNAS scale systems. They also plan to build the Gluster management within here. So you're going to be managing Gluster, not exactly from a web interface in scale, as I understand it. Now that's why I said, if you're looking for Gluster, you can find it from the command line in scale, but not in a web interface because, well, there's still roadmap that has not gotten there yet. So that's road map, where they're going, but not where they're at right now with scale. So if you are looking at deploying Gluster, great, go ahead and start testing with it, but you're not going to find a menu that just automatically sets up Gluster as of right now. Now when it comes to look and feel, TrueNAS scale and TrueNAS core actually look very similar. So either dashboard has a very similar layout. There's actually one thing I really wish they had, you have the ability to configure which widget show up on the dashboard here in scale. And I'm hoping that becomes a feature that you get in TrueNAS core here. But you have your similar services are here and laid out with the little sliders. And if we're over here, we're going to go to system. And we're going to go services. And they're laid out in a very similar way. Now that I've covered the similarities and differences, let's talk about which ones right for you. Now we'll start with performance because I think performance matters. And I know some people are going with that performance is everything, Tom. And it's not exactly everything. It kind of comes down to your use case. I have found with my testing so far in March, TrueNAS core seems faster than TrueNAS scale when it comes to iSCSI and Samba performance. If those things matter, you're already at the limits and you would love more speed. I don't feel that's moving over migrating to TrueNAS scale is going to give you more speed. Matter of fact, based on forum posts and write ups, I've seen in some of the posting and testing I've done TrueNAS scale is just not quite there yet in performance on the same hardware. Now I still have a few more systems to do some more testing to see if it was an incompatibility with just the systems I tested with. But you can see that when I take a system and load it from core to scale and I see a performance drop, that's a concern, especially if it's an environment where performance I really need, like I absolutely need the most performance I can get out of the hardware I have. That being said, if that's not an issue for you. Now the big considering factor next is the containers. If you really would love to have all these different Docker containers available to run directly and natively on the storage server because of the use cases you have and the things you're looking for just may not be available in a BSD jail, then scale is kind of an easy yes for you. This is what you should be using. You're going Tom, I have this list of containers. I love to run it all directly on my storage server. Then hands down scale is the one for you, especially because for some people, the only thing they're doing is running a series of containers and using the storage and maybe they transfer some files over Samba and losing a few points of performance is not going to be the end of the world when you're transferring files. Then once again, scale is probably a great solution for you. Now, neither of these, to my opinion, and I get asked this a lot, are replacements for full virtualization platforms, whether that's ESXi, XDP and G, Hyper-V, or Proxmox. If you're using those tools and going, can I replace those with scale or core because they both offer virtualization, they do not offer as many features within their virtualization platform as you're going to find in a dedicated product for that. For me, like I run XCPNG is my virtualization platform of choice and I use TrueNAS as a storage target, hence the reason I'm usually looking at performance over anything else. I'm not using containerization, especially when we deploy these commercially, that's just less of our use case. That's why we go with core for those. But that being said, the point is, I don't think it's a drop in replacement. But if you only have one VM and you're not worried about all the extra features because you just don't use them, then yeah, you can run a virtual machine in there. And one thing TrueNAS scale has really upped is the availability of pass through options and making it a lot easier to pull down and be able to pass through a video card, for example, which is a popular use case. So scales come a long way and core is a lot more difficult to do that on. So that's worth looking at if you have some simple virtualization needs. But overall, hopefully I've answered the question of the differences, the similarities, and give you some insights so you can understand which is the right for you. It's not like there's an easy answer. And for me, as I said in beginning, I have servers running scale, I have servers running core, some of it is for testing some of it's because I like some of the Docker stuff that goes on in there. And I want to, you know, be testing these on the cutting edge. And we happen to have a lot of servers in my lab. So hey, we loaded some with each one. So, you know, more fun to play with. I'll leave links to things I talked about in the description below, plus my tutorials I have on core. And of course, since scale is really saying I'm working on new tutorials, just because there's a few nuanced differences in the way some things are handled. So I'll be working on plenty of stuff for that. Leave your thoughts in the comments below or head over to the forums for a more in depth discussion. Thanks. And thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video. If you've enjoyed the content, please give us a thumbs up. If you would like to see more content from this channel, hit the subscribe button and the bell icon. If you'd like to hire a short project, head over to LawrenceSystems.com and click the hires button right at the top. To help this channel out in other ways, there's a join button here for YouTube and a Patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated. 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