 Welcome to the homelab show episode 27 true nas scale now It's still in beta folks, but I want people to be excited about it, which I actually know they are This is the excitement of the audience asking about true nas scale is why we're talking about true nas scale And even G's gonna be trying it out cuz I'm gonna need G's help on my upcoming tuna scale knowledge because it's got some familiar Words baked in there like kubernetes and docker and Jay knows kubernetes and docker. Yep Way more than Tom. So see Jay say go. I'm not that good at it. I'm like, well, you know, you're way better than me at it So I set the bar really high for myself and until I hit this ridiculous metric. I don't consider myself good Yeah, just the personal thing. So yeah, yeah So it's a collaborative thing and we thought we'd bring it over to the homelab show because we know a few of you Have been interested in some of those same topics and true nas scale presents a pretty cool platform to run this on So that's what our topic is for today. We're gonna dive into what is it? Why is it so much different than the BSD based true nas core and I also if anyone already watched my video on the topic, you'll know There's a performance hit you might take going there right now as of September of 2021 because it's in beta it doesn't seem to perform as well as core yet That's to be expected when you're talking about a new product please just when we talk about what's under the hood here They did a lot of engineering in it. So there's um, there's a lot of work that went into it So they haven't had time to give it a tune up yet And I've been trying I've been playing around with it. So I could play the role of the More entry level person that has a few questions about it, but I have been running it for a few days now So yeah, all right, but before we dive into that We must thank a sponsor of the show and that is Linode if you're listening to this podcast and downloaded it from the HomeLab.show website you downloaded it from Linode They have been a sponsor a great sponsor and a great way to get started on HomeLab When you don't have access to servers or you want to build some cloud applications or you even better You're worried that you are so I think this is one topic that we'll have to cover at some point building your own VPN server and Linode's a place you could do that Because you never know if your VPN provider happens to also work for some clandestine government Maybe doing illegal things and maybe gets into news about it. You don't know that but if you run it yourself You could know that so that might be a fun topic though Logless VPN servers in Linode and tell me a little more about Linode j you've been using it for a while, right? I have and I guess the first thing that comes to mind when you say not logging is sending all the logs to dev Know because you can do that if you are the captain of the ship So to speak you have the server and you can make sure that the logs are not being captured, which is pretty fun And you know like I've mentioned before I don't know if anyone listening is new But you know learn Linux TV is running all on Linode right now And I feel like it's a great compliment to the HomeLab because you as the HomeLab, you know captain So to speak you have um some some things local HomeLab local servers But there might be some things that you don't want local that you don't want exposed And we're crafty people. We're very creative. We can have things like zero tier between our HomeLab and Linode on that end to Segregate things into tunnel things so we could do some pretty crafty things there with the access and they have a marketplace One click apps. They just added added a guacamole like what today or yesterday? I don't remember So they're they're constantly adding new things and it's a lot of fun to use For sure But if you need to get started with Linode, we have an offer code down below Go ahead and click on that to get you some time on your servers to get started He's got an offer code on there that is really beneficial to you and helps out the channel So thank you for Linode for sponsoring this Now over to true nascale. I see the questions coming in right away on this there's going to be um things that are just not done yet and one of them by its namesake And this is not something we're going to dive deep into because it's simply not ready But I'll touch on the topic the true nascore is the evolution of free nas Coming into being true nas and a consolidation of the code bases that were free nas and true nas So free nas was the free version true nas was the paid version Oh, that was part of their enterprise support package They just merged them into one name and that new name is true nas core So there's the history of how we got to that But it's always been free bsd base The reason for that is because zfs is an absolutely amazing file system, but it was not supported Well, there's a lot of conflicts of why it really wasn't working well inside of linux fast forward to 2021 here We have zfs kernel modules in The linux kernel now so now that there's support and the Open zfs and all the little I'm not going to get into the history of the nuance of that because it'd take us Way off topic of the the arguments between licenses and things that um, yeah, that's complicated topics But either way, yes, it works now. Yes, there's ways to do it and That means that the team over at true nas is working on a linux based in that scale And for its namesake it stands for scale out what scale out means and versus just core Core has the ability to be redundant with redundant motherboards and a really high end I reviewed these for example would be the Ix systems m50 system and the m50 has dual redundant motherboards So it can be really high availability and keep that system up and running But scale out means a little bit different scale for its namesake means it can scale as in stack a lot of servers together Is their goal so you can buy physically multiple servers tie them together into a cluster Now this is the part that i'm not going to get too much into me and jay. We're talking about it a little bit before the show But one this is beta two Setting up gluster and things like that is They're trying to make it a lot simpler in scale, but it when you start saying cluster them together It's not like they automatically just turn into one mega thing So you don't take three of them or four or five put them in and they suddenly Cumulatively pull their powers together to create your super server with redundancy across there There's a lot that goes on within doing that There's also a performance hit you don't scale up the performance that easily Because now you're relying a lot on networking between all these devices to get all that data across your cluster So your networking has to be able to support that networking adds latency versus doing everything just against the drives Matter of fact, we you know wendell's covered this many times and he just did a video about Building sands and he talks about the challenges of you know getting the data, especially at mvme speeds You know through the system using rdma with the network interfaces when you talk about adding another Abstraction layer on top of that doing something like Gluster you're not going to instantly get more speed because you've just added another layer on top of trying to get performance Gluster is more designed to have that data scalability and expandability not necessarily To increase speed by having more nodes It doesn't Quite the same as it does like having more hard drives in a rate array gives you that more redundancy, but doesn't necessarily Mean well if we add five and it's this fast if we add five more Is it that much faster and the answer is not exactly so? We won't dive too much into that topic, but that is why the namesake of it is churnass scale, but it's uh The back to the part where j has some expertise is what features are in churnass scale and Once again, this is beta. So uh, try at your own risk, but there is an in-place upgrade that can be done I just covered that in a video But what did we learn the other day j when I was hanging out with you? Yeah, legacy encryption is um, not something that you can Move over to churnass scale because you know, we have free free bsd on one side with uh, I believe it's pronounced jelly Encryption and then that that doesn't exist on linux. So um, if you do the in-place upgrade It's not going to tell you hey you really shouldn't do this because you know you you have the wrong kind of encryption It okay. Yeah, it'll let you do it and then um You know, you'll find out that you can't unlock your um your volume. So then you got to go back to um, and there's Probably most likely I don't want to promise but a video coming with tom and I about how we're going to solve this problem I'm Literally working on it right now and it's going to be multi days until you know, the process is complete But you know, it'll probably Excuse me end up in a video Yes So me and j embarked on a mission to upgrade him because I upgraded my systems I thought we'll upgrade j systems and so It turns out that that as we said the g e l i jelly I think is how it's pronounced the encryption keys that were in the old version it dates back to free nas Are bsd only and also I didn't know j was using them I could have mentioned that, you know, but I didn't so I should have asked but yeah This is why we're sharing this knowledge of you So if you've been doing in-place upgrades as j has for a very long time Those encryption keys are only supported in bsd. So you can't do the migration You can do the migration if you built your pool with the more modern zfs native encryption And that is means you can go back and forth between true nas core or scale and do in-place upgrades Or roll back. Uh, the good news is the rollback system is pretty Straight forward. So if you do this you can roll back But a big warning if you have a lot of jails This is where the tooling is going to be very different the jails in true nas core are based on the bsd i o cage system so that's how the containerization works the Containerization inside of true nas scale is docker And I think that's where people get excited right away Because when you start talking about docker you talk about better support because I mean I can think of things like docker hub and docker pole and a million articles about how to do different things in docker They also have kubernetes in there. They also are using kvm But you go over the bsd side. How many of you have a ready-built image and i o cage for things I don't personally have that Yeah, and that's what created a lot of problems in the free bsd world was trying to find enough package Maintainers for a less popular package So people will complain like oh the packages are a little behind or just don't exist for popular products And obviously in the docker world, there's a docker container for like everything There's probably more docker containers than the world needs to have But at least some of the big projects out there the really popular ones are actually maintaining it I think is it a blue check mark they get when you go on docker hub? It's something like There's a when you're filtering for them you can find official that way you're not just pulling some rando One you're actually pulling from the official But that's the point you want to be able to have access to a lot of different things And this is where it gets really cool because with true nascale They're building this all in and they're going to be building it with these docker containers with the And i'm not as familiar with this and jays i think maybe a little more than me They're also integrating the helm charts in there to be able to pull things in and there's another affiliate not directly from iac systems, but it's called True charts and true charts is another one of the feeds you can put in there to be able to pull This gives you some really slick and i did in my review talking about this It's really slick you can pull so many applications built in there And my understanding is at some point you'll be able to easily just do a docker pull and grab other docker images and start building them in there Yeah, i've played around with it a little bit. I'm i meant to you know be further along I i had this really bonehead thing happen where You know, it's not getting an ip address on the on the you know spare server And i'm like what's going on and you know spend a whole evening on it wasted the whole evening just to find out Oh, it's on the wrong vlan. I probably should have checked that so um this morning As of this morning it you know true nascale is set up on my end and i installed next cloud And it was right in the gooey. Just click install Just as easy as it is in true nascore like unless you were looking for the back end Or you wanted to know what the back end was you probably wouldn't even notice that it's Docker or kubernetes unless you were you know look at the verbiage or something And I have to say it for being a beta I'm not giving anyone an invitation to switch their production servers over just yet But i'm kind of surprised at how polished it already is Yeah The the overall polish of it like I was able to muddle my way through I should say In setting up a few different things like syncing popular things i've used before in true nascale And it went pretty well the The availability man when you once you load the true charts on there you have the official Repository for my x-systems and you have this additional one. I added true charts I was like wow There's a lot in here and this is a cool feature They're giving you is easy ways in a standard format to add other Resources on there so you can have more repositories or even give you they give you the ability to create your own So if you're really enterprising like jay is eventually jay will probably have his own custom feed And you know you could build a series of containers and everything that it pulls and builds the system This is a pretty big advanced step forward and they put a lot of effort and tooling into this and I'll um I hate to say but i'm gonna throw a little shade at the unraid people because people are trying to get us to review Unraid neither mean or jay use unraid But this is actually something we've been waiting for was to true nascale because it solves the problem So to speak or the use case I should say not really problem of all the reasons people like unraid They're building a lot into this and I even seen um, there's some pass through options that are Really beta right now, but they're building some of that in there too. I seen people message me that they got it working I seen posts where people got pass through working It's because it's using kvm and it's using docker and it's familiar environments where there's a lot of documentation Because the io cage pass through documentation isn't near as good as the docker one So this Trying to check so those boxes people were looking for and I get you know I completely understand people who want to do a series of pass through things But they also want that confidence you get being able to rely on zfs and you know me and jay have both been Uh accused of being in the cult of zfs hails zfs or however you guys want And it's easy to do if you're I mean we it's like our content is a passion project So of course we're just going to talk about the things we're passionate about I mean, I could totally understand people having that opinion, but at the same time I mean if you're not doing it for fun, what's the point right and these are the things that we find fun so We like to check out new things anytime we can but Some things are really hard to give the same amount of attention as your primary thing because You know, I use pf sense and like we talked before am I going to want to convert everything Over to something else and spend weeks of architecture or re architecting to do a video I mean I probably should do that, but that's a lot of time. So sometimes it's just uh status quo is easier Yeah And there's a lot to be said when you know, you're we know all this stuff works in zfs We know the tunas core like we trust the As a development there's years and years and years of development that's gone into this at the enterprise level But also accessible by the homelab people. This is one of the cool things about this I'm installing and I have some videos coming up on some of these, you know, petabyte scale systems That's not being bought by home users. By the way, this is being bought by large businesses and integrated with other systems They have that are already running this and they're replacing some of the other names. You've heard of like del emc or different things by Nimble by hp. We've talked to a company. It's replacing some of these this stuff is really well used in the enterprise That's why it's so well developed and it's amazing because it's still free for you The homelab person watching this show to just go and download this big open source project That's got all this uh resources and energy put into developing it Yeah, there's a couple quick thoughts I had about the homelab tie into this because I kind of feel like Some people might have the thought process or the question like Why would I as a homelab person want to use true nas scale and the reason why I think you might want to consider that is because True nas core is the standalone Essentially standalone. I mean, obviously we can network anything with the right settings But it's you know, it's core standalone and then scale obviously like I said, it scales out in the homelab I mean, we could argue that people aren't really scaling out servers. That's usually like an enterprise thing one server for the average homelab person could serve the whole house, but Where I think this really does tie into homelab and why you people still might want to consider scale and why it's probably even better is the um You know the fact that we have kubernetes and docker here And these are things that homelab people are learning anyway And then we have kvm virtualization, which is another thing that people with homelab are learning every You know anyway, so even though we as homelab people we're probably not going to buy like 50 servers All the let's be honest. That'd be pretty freaking cool I love that but we generally just generally speaking we'll have like one nas server Maybe two if we have some kind of like a redundancy thing going on But we don't have like a bunch of them But even if we have just one server we benefit because a feature set maps better to homelab In my opinion than true nas core does so I think once this becomes final Then I think it would be worth a comparison that See if that holds true. My opinion holds true that it is actually better for homelab And I think that's probably based on what I'm seeing the conclusion will get to Yeah, the um other thing that I wanted to talk about inside of scale and It's the fact that it's got a cli system. That's very different This is not something I've explored much But what they refer to it as just the true nas cli and it's very api driven One of the reasons for doing this is it wasn't as much of A simple thing you could do inside of true nas core And what I mean by simple is you want to script things You want to start deploying these servers and be able to script it But one of the first warnings you get when you've I don't know if you ever notice this J when you log in to true nas core from the command line You'll get this warning changes made here will not be reflected and are not saved or not I think it says like not persistently saved inside the ui That's because we're all stored in type of database now the database storage of these functions is nice Makes easy for backup so you're not trying to chase around a bunch of random config files But it makes it difficult for people who want to do things like ansible This is where true nas scale has an api system in there that allows you to interact with it And of course allows for scripting because now you can just push api calls to it Which means you could either do it from inside the system too pushing these api calls or Establish a connection to it to make the api calls And this is something they have with core now too. They're working on some api stuff But it's being really well developed to allow a scripted faster install and set up with these So eventually there will be j and his ansible deploy will include how to do a true nas scale server When he gets but he gets probably will yeah, I don't know though I mean because it's one of those things where rebuilding a nas is kind of a special kind of animal here because It's not just a server configs And if you're doing it right if you have redundancy in the boot volume redundancy on the data Hopefully you shouldn't ever need to redo it So you could argue that the amount of work to automate it might be more Then the amount of time you you would actually spend rebuilding it, you know, which is hopefully never yeah, then again I I do a lot of things in ansible that is probably taking me way more time than the time it's saving me because it's just so fun So I could very well just do that to say I've done it but um or just to use it as practice But it's nice to know I can do that Yeah, and I think the the big thing about this is when you're talking about the home lab It's fun to learn on but if you do look at some of the use cases some of these businesses may have for this um businesses are You know accumulating data at an incredible rate including in especially the automotive sector This is something uh relational to my business here We we support different sections of the automotive sector here because i'm in the detroit area and some of these clients They're you know, just the amount of storage it takes the amount of engineering It goes into these vehicles where the data or telemetry they need from means they are Really ramping up their data needs and their data warehousing to make better decisions about cars The data's got to go somewhere you have to scale out those servers And that's kind of one of the niches that they're trying to work into We're also seeing an increase in general and of course they're all running core because this is production stuff of A lot of movie companies that we're consulting with on there. So They're trying to add clusters as the you know camera resolution gets higher That means the rate of ingesting data and the amount of data you create gets higher and once again This is where all this kind of gets converged in there to be able to add these in So i'm really excited when to get the clustering Uh working because it will be something kind of cool to be able to spin up another one Build a base data set and then add it to the cluster. This is all kind of where TrueNAS scale is going from a larger scale design yep another thing too is that um, this kind of changes the the uh conversation a bit when we're talking about um TrueNAS versus Synology because Before today, I would say Synology is a great fit for someone who Wants like easy docker containers to run because it's you know, the integration and Synology is really good And then I would argue that TrueNAS isn't as good I mean jails are nice and all but if you want to run containers, you could probably find a way to do it But it's not going to be native or whatever. So um, now we have Some of the features that made Synology stand out a little bit in TrueNAS scale Which is actually blurring the line a little bit and from what i've seen so far granted only one day The integration with containers is really good So now and also virtual machines too because um, it's not like we didn't have that before but it's kvm now So at this point, you know, it's getting closer to Synology another reason why it might be a good fit for homelab Yeah, one of the other things that's going to be interesting is they're integrating zfs with the docker and kubernetes so being zfs aware means it's going to have the ability to do snapshots and Be able to switch things very quickly because the ways zfs snapshots work Almost makes it transparent how fast you can revert back to a specific Area so you can snapshot exactly there and this is the advantage of a copy on right file system Where you can say this point in time is where the snapshot occurs without taking things down It also then allows you to quickly roll it back You do that orchestration with something like kubernetes and now we can iterate through different versions and upgrades by simply snapshotting backwards It adds another dimension to how fast you can get things back up and running This is another feature that you're kind of Building in there is having it not just run kubernetes, but kubernetes integrated with some of the functionality of the operating system to make this that much better. So it's really it's really pretty slick It is a speaking of slick I like the interface and how they simplified it because At first I thought that TrueNAS scale had fewer options and it does because it's beta. So there's going to be some things missing but the menu was like half the length of the TrueNAS core menu and at first I'm thinking wow There's a lot of missing features because I was looking for Um cloud sync tasks. I'm like, okay. Well, that's not here And then I looked at the data protection section And when you click on data protection then underneath that you have your scrub tasks You have cloud sinks are seeing smart tests replications snapshots All under that one menu which to me kind of makes more sense So it's not that those things are missing you you might think that they're missing But when you click on that menu it makes sense So now I think it might get to a point where it's harder to go back to TrueNAS core because I like the new layout Yeah, that that is an interesting Deviation if you those of you that already familiar with TrueNAS core is they've changed the way they name things a little bit And consolidated things a little bit better the permissions now that is a buggy portion of the beta one I will confirm people ask me to do a video on it. I'm like If you go into forums and spend any time you'll find that a video on it won't help you they I'm trying I try to do everything properly through the interface when the interface isn't beta And there's a problem in the interface the answers go to the command line If you google at all or spend any time in a forums how to solve some of the problems You go to the command line and I've seen a few people post you have to use the set acl type commands from the command line So it's uh, not a matter of time doing a video on it to solve your problem Your problem is you have to go to the command line occasionally and either strip all the acls out or rebuild the acls When they get goofed up That is still something as of right now the beta of TrueNAS scale has some bug buggy-ness with I can get it working. It just doesn't seem to have the multi Tiered permissions with granular control that I could would say is easier in TrueNAS core So this is still one of those fuzzy points that Is there the next thing I will talk about though is performance I have a video detailing out before and after the After doing an in-place upgrade and no it's not because of being an in-place upgrade It's not like windows where there's some weird dls floating around somewhere or anything like that It's causing some weird problems. Linux is not as mysterious It's a fresh operating system install It imports the ZFS pool into TrueNAS scale, but there are some performance issues But the reason there's performance issues Like we've talked about all the way up until here There's so much engineering that went into all the extra features they added that leaves us with kind of a deficit in type A deficit in time and a deficit in time means we haven't had time to performance tune it We need the feature work and then we'll come back around because once it's working without error and it is My iSCSI and my nfs shares no problem going from core to scale. They imported fine. They worked perfectly fine so I didn't have to reconfigure them the hypervisor I'm using is xcp and g it had no idea the underlying operating system had changed All I went from core to scale connected All the vms worked they booted right up which made it really easy to do performance testing because I did the performance testing before going to For on core Shut down those vms loaded scale brought the vms back up. They have no idea. They're not running on a vst They're now on linux, uh, you know running in uh, as far as their storage target goes and ran the same test again and the tests were um Not as good to say that the The years and years of performance tuning that's gone into true nas core is going to show up here They've had so much time in so many versions to get it right to figure out the most optimal alignment of settings in iSCSI or nfs to get the best results that didn't happen overnight It happened over years of development now that same process is Going to be put in there. I think it's going to not take years to get the performance tuning right It's just going to take someone taking the time to do it They just go to apply the knowledge to have because it's a lot of the same development team and narrow it down so this is going to be like One of those things is going to take a little time I would say we probably won't see performance until it gets in a release candidate because they're so busy You know doing these code sprints of let's get all these features in here Let's sort out all these problems and uh, yeah the performance kind of from an application standpoint There it's not like anyone's really using this in production. Well, some people are me I guess, you know in jay's going to be using it in our production But we're technical people who will muddle through the errors and drop to the command line and do a Open a giro ticket when we need to so right right. We uh, we don't mind. Um Now you brought up the um the way that updates happen and I want to you know, take a quick diversion on that I feel like it it we gloss over that everyone does it's natural because when something works It's like, okay. It works and then moving on But the fact that it works. I mean this is really great I think that the way that true nas handles updates is the way I think every operating system and platform should handle them because And I'm not just talking about true nas scale at this point with true nas core I install an update and I update to a new version. I can go back to a previous version because It's like it separates the data and the operating system such that the You know operating system layer the boot volume You know, you could go back to a previous version and switch The only exception might be zfs flags or things that are added later on but um I mean, that's how I've envisioned or how I wish you know a lot of linux distributions were because if you have You know the linux distribution as a separate volume separate from the data And it's just you could replace it switch it out if something works Just boot to the other or doesn't work you boot to the other one And then what I wasn't expecting though because none of what I just said is new this has been true true nas verb and free nas and and whatnot but We converted mine to true nas scale by just installing it in place And it didn't overwrite the one that was there it added to it And there was an option at the beginning where you could tell it what you want to do So we so added it and I booted into it. That's when we discovered Famously that the encryption doesn't work, but it wasn't a problem because I you know Tom walked me through it You just click on the thing and tell it this is the active one Just choose the one from beforehand and reboot it and you're back to the way it was You don't have to reinstall anything. It's just like a pointer gets You know it's just pointing to the one you want to boot to And um, there's linux distributions that have a similar style already So I don't want to imply that that doesn't exist It's just not the norm And true nas makes it look easy like they just have it down like if everything else was this way I mean imagine you're running pop o s or a boon to debbie and whatever it is And you could set it up like this and then oh the updates broke something Let me go ahead and switch over we could do lvm snapshots Butterfs snapshots already we have zfs on our linux distro We could do that But with true nas it's just super simple to do and it just works so well that I think it's a really good example of how to do it Right Yeah, this is also They kind of have an advantage because your data is always a separate physical drive or series of drives from your boot So you can set up in a boot raid pool And I mean it's ideal if you built all your linux just shows like this and you followed the Path of mount home on a separate hard drive completely than your boot drive But then again jay's got a laptop in front of him. I'm at a desktop But you know, obviously when i'm not here, I'm right I pretty much use a laptop all the time when i'm not at my office with our editing workstations Uh and granted you can get systems of multiple drives in them And there's ways to do it with like lvm and things like that Which I think you have a couple videos in lvm j. Yeah, I have actually a deep dive video It's in the description of most of my videos nowadays There's a direct link to it And it I don't know how long it is, but I think it's fairly lengthy and it just goes through lvm in general So if you need to learn lvm, you can probably just watch that one video. Yeah, which is your most of what you need Yeah, so there's there are ways to do it in there But you're right though It makes me very comfortable when I do these upgrades because I know Implicitly that the boot pool is always stored separately Now a few other things that are behind the scenes that I do like that's native Is wire guard is right in there built into true nas so if you need to tie your true nas scale system to other systems and As we talked about clustering and management wire guard is natively built in They did a nice job on that and this once again becomes from the benefit of wire guard Isn't new to the linux kernel has been there a while So this is the linux kernel implementation of wire guard So for those of you that want to have some servers that need to securely talk to each other But they may be remotely do Remote from each other You can build wire guard tunnels within them and they built in open vpn to The later versions of true nas core. So it's still there and I believe wire guard is supported in core But i'm not sure but they're going to do some native support Which is obviously going to get a lot of people excited It's also in general kind of a nice thing to do So if your firewall maybe doesn't have wire guard supporter That's not where you want to do it and you want to have remotely accessible data source But people have asked me this and this is where there's an obstruction layer problem I want to give someone access to only one specific thing or one data set and i'm like no no no One data set access to wire guard isn't how that works wire guard gives them access to that particular system You can bind a share to a specific ip address. I think but that gets a little bit tricky It's not where you really want to do it's not for granular access really That's a little bit more of a complicated topic. I'll at least show that out there It's not that it can't be done There's just a lot more to doing it with ip restrictions and things like that when you build your wire guard tunnels That's going to be way down after full release before time gets to doing a video and explaining how to do that Right that's going to be a that's going to be a good video though. I can't wait to see the final version of this Even though i'm running it now. So I guess it doesn't matter. I'll just keep updating Yeah, now they are leaving in the other features. So they aren't As much as they're doing this they are doing some Of the traditional things so you will be able to use this and I I have not tested this at all But I have had people tell me the active directory support is there I know like there's a button for it, but whether or not it actually works I didn't try to tie it to active directory, but those type of things are in here They did bring over the self-encrypting job drive options. They also still have all the same Matter of fact, one of the nice things is because you're using zfs encryption Going back and forth with the zfs encryption between systems Works perfectly fine your compatibility with core and scale or zfs in general Should work perfectly fine. Well, I can vet specifically that When you need to transfer things from core to scale and back and forth that hasn't caused me any problems those are Well supported and well documented in there and it's the same Matter of fact, the replication menu works perfectly fine when you have to add it I've done videos how easy they've made it. I love how simple it is I want to replicate this zfs system Running true nas to this one and it doesn't care if it's scale or core. You can go back and forth between Without I didn't have any issues at all moving data around between these matter of fact I had to do it this morning Because I broke things and I don't know if I'll do it a video. It's more I couldn't tell if I was having a hardware or software problem. So I formatted About 200 terabytes and started reloading it all again We think we've narrowed it down to some loose things, but it's a it's a lot the The speed at which it moves is pretty fast watching zfs send send data that fast on there. So Yeah, that's uh, yeah 200 terabytes. Wow Yeah, there's a lot of data we get to move around so But fair chunk Yep fair chunk on there. I think they pretty much covers most of what we want to talk about there We're excited about it. It's really a slick system the things that I seem to ask the very beginning Well, what about next cloud? Yes next cloud, of course, there's a doctor image for next cloud I haven't set it up yet on there, but syncing went perfectly fine. Next cloud is is a recent version I think that's enough that people are going to be excited. So is Let's see how the one out there plex, uh, there's no versions of plex new versions of that I've had people tell me and I have not tested they got plex pass through working I don't have this set up at home where I use plex So I don't know how the pass through workship, but uh checking the forums people definitely been talking about it So I noticed that there's a UI option for some of the pass through too. So that's kind of it's not something Is going to necessarily all be from command line only which means More people are going to like it and like I said earlier I'm not trying to shade at the enraid people But this looks like it might be a pretty solid for those of you that are waiting for all these features to come This might be the time when you say hey, maybe I don't like enraid that much If you like enraid and I don't I just don't have a use case for it because I like this system better You know go use it. I'm not telling you. I don't have reason not to use enraid I did see someone point out that enraid does not have the uh performance that you'll get So if you are performance oriented, yeah, that is True it will not match with true nascore It might match match right now with true nascale because as I mentioned the performance hasn't been stellar, but You know, that's that's file system performance as a storage target The file system performance immediately on the machine itself seems perfectly fine. So Yeah I I was a little confused and I don't know if um, I mean this is going to be kind of like speculation and whatnot But you know when I read or when I was reading yesterday to get up to speed on this, you know You know, why is there true nascore and why is there true nascale? Let me cover to at the beginning of this episode But to kind of peel that back a little bit If you read the documentation from true nasc they'll tell you, you know Chorus if you want stand alone if you want to scale out go a scale Yeah, that's not simple to me, but where I guess I'm confused is that There's so much work being put into um true nascale So many great changes being made there Why not just say if you want stand alone have a stand alone true nascale if you want scale out Just scale out true nascale, but now At first they kind of like cut, you know, they consolidated True, you know, free nasc into true nascore I kind of feel like they're creating the same problem again by now having another thing to maintain Do you think they're just going to replace true nasc proper with true nascale at some point because I would Complete speculation as well. I do not have any inside even though I work a lot and we are a reseller fry systems fold disclosure here I don't get any inside knowledge and what they're doing here But from an external perspective I would say they're hedging their bets because we all know bsd has been around a long time and At some point I want to maybe dive in with michael lucas because I my favorite quote I've seen was bsd does it first but linux does it better There's a lot of history of bsd doing really cool things ahead of when that same type of Feature set like containerization comes to linux, but linux docker is you know, maybe Newer and fresher the way the containerization works inside of linux, but it's obviously More popular hands down and this can create kind of a problem there I would not call bsd project dead, but it does not have the same amount of Development someone's going to point out but apple runs on bsd. Yeah, we know That's not necessarily The lifeblood of what keeps bsd popular It's not going to go away like tomorrow or even five years from now But if you're looking at the long term and they want to go where the market demand is They know there's a market for this so they're hedging their bets going why not take advantage of this market use all the skillsets we have Ix systems their back end is to sell hardware and sell these systems They want to make sure they have something that can compete in the market space They want to have something that can compete that scales to the size and large data set needs that customers have And that's not something they could build in with the free bsd So I think they're making sure this other market segment is met But they also know the absolute dependability of their bsd systems They're popular and a lot of these are sold with five-year support contracts So they're going to keep developing on there. They have their business is really good over at ix systems They are selling a lot of these servers still with true nas core. That's what you know, we're the one We're delivering the large-scale system We're delivering to a client is a true nas core system And it's going to be supported for a number of years at that particular client. So I don't think it's going anywhere I think it's them It's like well, we have all this expertise and we know there's a market demand That void will be filled by a competitor or it can be filled by us And I think that's kind of where we're at with it of doing it. It's it's different enough it's not like they're abandoning ship and saying no, we're not going to do this but They really I don't know how well bluster works inside of bsd Like I'm not sure where it support is but I know it seems to be well supported in scale and linux The linux world seems to like it a lot better. So I think this is going to be one of those Um filling that market gap before someone else does and also hedging your bets because what if 10 years from now Uh bsd is even less popular. Where does that leave a company? Um, let's start over guys for 10 years behind and someone else already has a competing product Now let's start on it or do we start today and use a lot of expertise Now what they did too is they um big framework change. They modularized the middleware that runs it So you have the kernel your your os base level stuff Then you have the middleware system And then you have things like zfs that it's attaching to because of the transportability of zfs between these And just having a different having the middleware be transportable This actually allows them to work on both projects simultaneously So I think we're going to see someone what's in scale come back over to core Like like you said the ui has a little bit of a slick interface to it But that's just middleware that can be ported over. I think it's all written in python the api calls They start making them similar between the two of them now I can have interoperability with both systems without having to maintain two systems technically Yes, i'm aware I see someone always is going to say things like well, netflix uses bsd Netflix does but and they're definitely a big contributor back to bsd But it's not necessarily It it's not necessarily going to be what keeps the project alive. It's what they went with because it was so good but It's not like they won't switch if something comes along better that performs better for delivering content. So It's whatever content then what delivers it in the future It's going to come down to the popularity of a project and a number of contributors to that project to keep a project alive And I think in this industry, it's important to keep in mind that any change other than the Things that come out all of a sudden that people get crazed about It's kind of slow right because if you look at in the linux world, I mean we're migrating to wailand You know from x or we still have x or it's still coming out with new version And I don't even personally think that every distro is going to move to wailand until probably five years from now but it's happening however slow and then you look at the phasing out of 32 bit code which is still a problem now, so You know like you said it's hedging their bets and many transition if bsd is going to eventually not be as relevant I mean, it's not like like you said, it's not going to be tomorrow. I mean it could be five You know it could be very long time from now. So it's not like all of a sudden we're going to wake up in the morning Oh bsd doesn't exist anymore Maybe but not I don't think soon. So I don't I'm not too worried about it Yeah, and me and jay both have a background of working in the enterprise market. The enterprise market moves really slow It is not like a homelab where we're just tearing things down and playing with the next great thing Doing the the amount of legacy and the long tail of legacy support that we see in the enterprise market means If these are installed and they work and someone's familiar with them And they're managing a massive data center filled with true nas core systems They're going to keep demanding true nas core systems until they can not get true nas core systems in there So, you know that yeah, the enterprise market moves slow and in kind of rightfully so if they built a business model on it You can throw netflix as an example They have a lot of experience. They have a lot of really skilled bsd engineers They're going to keep bsd as long as they can because they don't want to change out the talent They have that knows how the system and you know when the now whatever the new show comes out They want it to be reliably delivered not going I don't know what happens when what happens when we release a new version of the witcher And everyone tries to watch it at the same time. They know how to deal with it now They may not know if they switch platforms So this is why we often see long support for things and things like that I feel like the bsd developers if that ever did go down They're pretty much good until they retire in my opinion They're not going to be jobless ever because it's like even if bsd goes out and no one's using it You still have a bunch of companies out there that are using it and they don't want to move and they have Unsupported systems. They'll probably hire those bsd engineers to keep patching their stuff that they're using and you know keep them employed so Um, I I think it'll in the grand scheme of things. It'll probably work out just fine You know one thing I will cover really quickly here the virtualization that has been built into true nas core You know and the virtualization is built into your nas scale One they're not designed in the same way Or with the same thought process that I've seen that you would get from proxmox vmware or xcp ng xcp ng proxmox Too popular ones of mj have covered and of course we're all familiar with vmware the elephant in the room They're designed to have all kinds of features for live migration or virtual machines and really in depth virtual machine management and orchestration I've not really seen the effort to put into A true nas scale or core to do anything other than be able to run a couple of vm's in there It doesn't have all this cool clustering and live migration I don't even really see that particular feature on the roadmap in the same way So I don't think they're going to try to compete with Orchestration systems that are well developed for virtual machine management. They want to be the storage target for those things They might be part of the hyper converged infrastructure. That's the back end of storage for them But they're not as likely to be the competitors in that market space by vmware vmware and Citrix have certified that true nas core can be their back end like they have a Certification so is vm for example. So I think that's where their target Is in their current customer base for large scale paying customers is still huge in that market And I just don't think they want to start going. Hey, let's try to directly go head to head with And they would be in the in commercial market like vmware and build an entire virtual machine orchestration system I don't really see them going there. It's not there. It's not really their focus So it's not something that necessarily now for homeland people Maybe it replaces something like proxmox or cpng so you can run the thing in one place But for the enterprise market, it doesn't seem to be exactly where they're going I would I would agree because um There's really no value and I feel like it's a it's not a good business case One to do to try to do everything well. You have your number one Export the number one thing you do that what you're famous for you have these sub projects that enhance that But if you're trying to bring everything to the same level, you're not going to do that So basically do one thing do it well and do some other things while you're at it Just check some boxes But also true nas I don't think they could ever compete with those virtualization solutions because They are doing one thing and they're doing it well. They don't share cpu cycles between You know this feature that feature it's for virtualization So they're not trying to be too many things. It's running on the bare metal And if if true nas was ever to actually be in feature parity with xcpng and proxmox Then the performance overall in my opinion will just go down and it'll never be As performant as a dedicated hypervisor solution would be anyway, and I think they know that I think in my opinion virtualization is there to enhance the storage. So maybe you want to run some kind of application And you want to you know Have something to do with data storage and it doesn't run well in a container because some things just don't Then you can run it in a virtual machine And it's good to run on true nas because it's for a true nas related feature set And then for your actual vms, you'll just probably run them on the hypervisor So I think you as the home lab or enterprise admin you'll decide, you know what's important virtualization container and what needs to be where And they give you the flexibility to do that. But at the end of the day, it's a true nas not You know true containers or true vm right And I think one of the the popular use cases we're going to see is We've done this as storage target with separate servers, but with a better virtualization stack I could imagine integrating the one server to make me happy. There are some Commercial products out there for surveillance cameras one of the challenges is The demand as the camera resolution goes up the amount of storage you need goes up Managing all that storage can be rather difficult So the solution is you build the server that runs the camera software And then you tie it to a back end storage and we've done this like with true nas core You go a step further and and the virtualization gets better because I never found the virtualization great in any manner Sorry, uh, it's always been bad and true nas core. I've always found it quirky and not great But if they get kvm at least running so I can run a virtual machine in there It would be very ideal for me to take one great system Load the nvr software on there and these are commercial products I don't know of any good open source one But you know throw in whichever one you're looking for and some of these even though they're commercial and they're licensed They do work inside of linux. We run these for some of the school systems If you had a good enough hypervisor having your hypervisor be directly attached not through networking necessarily but through Uh a mount point that you've configured in there either be a docker container Or if you did it through virtualization, you have to do it through a mount point through some type of networking But you kind of get the idea where you're running it all in one place. So the Abstraction layer is minimum. I'm not trying to run through a network switch over I'm running a virtual machine directly on where my storage is for Uh 300 cameras at running at 4k. There's a lot of advantages of doing it all in one place I think that's a strong use case for it But having the vm separate doesn't make necessary sense like we talked about it's not really an orchestration tool for that Yep, so Hopefully that covers everything top to bottom and sideways and scaled out the your ideas of how this works Scaled your knowledge out a bit. I think we scaled your knowledge a little bit on Yes scale Do check it out. Now if there's a bug you find this product is in beta, which means you're definitely going to find bugs There is a JIRA ticket system. They have there are forums They have and this is important complaining about it on youtube doesn't necessarily get the developers attention If you want to actually help improve these projects and get these bugs solved Which is why me and j are tackling the beta product is so we can go in here Learn how it works. And if we find something that doesn't work, you know, I found a bug a while back on the way They were doing encryption turns out it was duplicate But still I did my diligence and found out that the import had an error on it There was a workaround for the way the keys are important But these are type of bugs that get fixed because we take the time to report them We make a reproducible problem and I look to see if there's a ticket existing already or maybe add my thoughts Of how it can be better. That's how these projects get better I always like to remind people of that because it don't work is a common youtube It's a stupid product because it don't work is another common youtube comment I'm like that doesn't that doesn't tell me what doesn't work or how do we really improve the project? So I always encourage people to make sure that they are filling tickets out on all of these things The more information the better. Yep. So we'll leave links. So I see, you know, we're to find true nascale That's easy enough to find we'll leave a link where you can download it Of course not that it takes too much, but get started with it. You can do the in place upgrade I've got videos on that. I won't be doing too many videos until the product comes out of beta But hey, if you're enthusiastic and want to start playing with all this and me and j will be doing some because j is going to teach me how Uh, the doctor said he taught me what a pod is. I didn't know I I googled it, but you know, I happen to be sitting here next to j. So I was like, hey, j. What's a pod? All right, thank you all for joining us smash the like button Let's youtube know that other people should watch this and for those of you that are listening Thank you very much for joining us on this and uh, see you next time Thank you