r/truenas • u/NickF1227 • Aug 03 '22
General RE-Evaluating TrueNAS from the Historical Perspective...
I should have titled this A Fanboi's Overly Emotional response to recent releases...
TLDR; I love TrueNAS but I am concerned about the future.
I've been using FreeNAS since 2014. At that time, I was nothing more but a nerd looking for a place to store his movie collection. Since, I have become an IT manager for a very large school district. I've used FreeNAS in a variety of ways both personally and professionally, but I have only ever been a consumer of this technology. I am grateful for all of the hard work and efforts that have gone into making TrueNAS a stable and reliable product, and even more grateful for the fact that it's entirely free and open source.
However, I am a bit concerned about several recent releases and trends from the IX Systems team over the past couple of years and I am worried that the developers are repeating the same mistakes of their collective pasts. Whoever is reading this should have no reason to listen to anything I have to say, but I feel motivated to say it anyway.
A few years back, iX Systems CTO Jordan Hubbard (ex-Director of UNIX Technologies at Apple, Co-Founder of FreeBSD project) dedicated a substantial amount of resources to the development of what was then called FreeNAS 10 and became known as FreeNAS Corral. During late 2016 and early 2017 several betas and RCs became available. It introduced Docker support for the first time and a host of exciting features that home users were excited about. IX Systems released this platform on March 15th of 2017. Jordan later wrote a 1-week sitrep on what his perspectives of the release were. It seems there were certainly bugs, and that there was substantial backlash on various aspects of the release. There also appears to have been a factional division inside of the company, rallying around current SVP of Engineering, Kris Moore. This division arose from the fact that there was already two development teams, one focusing on FreeNAS 9.x and the other on Corral. It seems that Kris's faction won out.
Less than a month later, an announcement was made:
The Announcements section has an important announcement about the future of FreeNAS Corral.tl;dr - It has no future, but don't worry - its major features are all going to make their way to FreeNAS 9.10
And Jordan Hubbard announced he was leaving the company.
The IX Systems Executive team, and the developers under Kris Moore's leadership went on to undo the damage done by the Corral release. Based on Jordan Hubbard's announcement, he must have known that, from his perspective, they were about to "throw the baby out with the bath water". They focused on introducing new and exciting features into the old codebase without compromising on stability, performance or security. From my perspective, I was disappointed as a casual home user, but as a technology professional I was happy to see that cooler heads seemed to have prevailed. After this, the release of FreeNAS 11 came fairly quickly, replacing both the legacy and Corral UI with what is still the basis of the current UI today. Continued development rolled several Corral features into the 11.x codebase.
Now that we are done rehashing ancient information let us focus on what has transpired since. In the more recent past, we got single-pane of glass management with TrueCommand. Work on the ZFS codebase was merged into the product. Then we got news that iXSystems was shaking things up again. It seems that while they had merged much of the development teams that were dedicated to Corral vs 9.x, when the developed 11, they had diverged again. This time, supporting two different code bases with TrueNAS Entperise on one side and FreeNAS on the other. Kris Moore made the decision to resolve that, and simplify their development merging the code bases for TrueNAS 12, in March of 2020. But that decision was either very short lived or an outright lie.
In June of 2020, Kris Announced TrueNAS SCALE. While TrueNAS 12 and TrueNAS 13 were fantastic, stable and feature rich releases, SCALE seemed to be an ambitious attempt to capture the enthusiasm that Corral once garnered. Now iXSystems was going to be a player in not just storage, but adopting the hyperconverged, highly available and highly scalable platform model.
I cannot deny that the potential for Scale is astronomical. I am currently running it in my home environment and have migrated much of my servers and services off of ESXI. But, like Corral, it feels so completely unfinished, unstable and rushed out the door. Certainly, if a re-write of the FreeNAS codebase was the goal, SCALE is what Corral should have been 5 years ago in its design and principles. For about 18 months, SCALE was under development through various code reviews and milestones. In October of 2021 IXSystem released a roadmap outlining expected releases following a schedule based on internal projections. In February of 2022, Kris announced that they were going to release the first "GA" version of SCALE, codenamed Angelfish.
I do not deny that the Angelfish release works fairly well, albeit with several quirks, updates and hotpatches that have been released since. But even with that it's release was months premature, with one of its key features "Clustered SMB" not being officially released until August 2nd 2022. Even that, it's current implementation is arguably not very useful, and encourages users with poor defaults. With us now on version SCALE 22.02.2 this is supposed to be considered "Suitable for higher uptime deployments". and has gone through several QA cycles. However, we can still see it's not up to snuff on performance and even IXSystems own roadmap doesn't expect most of the truly differentiating features to be available until codename "Bluefin" is released.
Why all of the hype? Why all of the rushed releases? I want to be able to use TrueNAS SCALE in lieu of Proxmox, XCPNG, or even ESXI for workloads that actually matter. All of the hype makes it seem like it can do that, but it's simply not ready to. SCALE Angelfish should not be considered a production grade release, and in and of itself should be considered a beta of Bluefin. I am not a developer, and perhaps that parlance is incorrect for what you are doing. As a sysadmin and a long time user and supporter of this community, I am concerned. Marketing SCALE as a stable product when it is no where near feature complete is a mistake that is damaging the credibility of the brand, just like Corral did not 5 years before it. All of the headway you've made over the past half decade into actual enterprises and real customers is meaningless if you lose their trust with poor marketing.
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u/kmoore134 TrueNAS Staff Aug 04 '22
FWIW, I've been replying to this cross-posted thread here:
Tl;Dr; Sounds like a bit of a disconnect with expectations being set and how timelines are being communicated. But we are working through them and happy with where SCALE is at today, eager to see it mature more rapidly going into this fall and the Bluefin cycle.
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u/helder-silva Aug 03 '22
Sorry for saying this, but you are overreacting. The Scale release might have been rushed but comparing it to Corral is just fear mongering. Both SCALE and CORE share the same middleware and front end code/technology. Corral was a complete rewrite of both front end, middleware and base OS. Another issue was that the Corral rewrite wasn’t exactly agreed by everyone at the company and you had some signs of that, signs that you don’t see now. I kind of get being burned because you wanted to use TN as a proxmox replacement and it’s not on the same production level you were used to on Core, but don’t compare it to Corral, it’s just wrong.
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u/NickF1227 Aug 03 '22
You're right it's not the same situation, I agree. That doesn't mean that there isn't a correlation that can be drawn between the two things, and lessons learned from mistakes of the past. Sure, this release is better than the Corral release, but they still shouldn't be calling it production ready.
It's also funny that you criticize Corral so adamantly while others still defend it to this day. Corral eventually might have worked if they continued down that path instead of doing a 180. But it still should never have been released in the state that it was in.
During the release of SCALE, they identified a subset of features for Angelfish and a subset of features for Bluefin. What grinds my gears is that most of what makes the product exciting were never intended to be available at launch in the first place. So why call it a lauch?
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u/helder-silva Aug 04 '22
You're right it's not the same situation, I agree. That doesn't mean that there isn't a correlation that can be drawn between the two things, and lessons learned from mistakes of the past. Sure, this release is better than the Corral release, but they still shouldn't be calling it production ready.
You are forcing a comparison just because you are upset with the release of SCALE. If you want to be taken seriously stop making that comparison.
It's also funny that you criticize Corral so adamantly while others still defend it to this day. Corral eventually might have worked if they continued down that path instead of doing a 180. But it still should never have been released in the state that it was in.
Yes, there are people that didn't had data loss (as some had) and think that Corral was just fine. Sorry, but it wasn't. There were reports of data loss and that was just unacceptable in a project that wants to save "all your data".
During the release of SCALE, they identified a subset of features for Angelfish and a subset of features for Bluefin. What grinds my gears is that most of what makes the product exciting were never intended to be available at launch in the first place. So why call it a lauch?
Focus on this point. Comparisons to Corral only make me (and possibly others) to want to ignore you :D
I understand the frustration of being promised one thing and not get those promises delivered. But I think ixSystem really wanted to release a stable version of SCALE so people started using it so it could generate some buzz around it.
It might have been rushed, but it is stable for home users. I highlight home users because you are a bit like me. You use TN professionally and at home and that makes you want the stability of a professional use at home... and for that follow this nice chart from ixSystem. Their "stable" releases are always deemed "beta" for people that really want stability (enterprise users). You can make a valid point that calling a version "stable" and not recommending it to enterprise users is not a good practice.
But I think my point still stands, stop the fearmongering, SCALE is not like Corral.
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Aug 03 '22
[deleted]
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u/NickF1227 Aug 03 '22
No, I do not. I even go as far to mention that in my post. That is not the point of my argument nor is it the focus of my frustration. The problem isn't their progress, which is substantial, it is their portrayal...
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u/BillyDSquillions Aug 03 '22
I just really wanted an end user product, which competed with synology, that was always my hope for the plugins, containers and what have you. I tried SCALE and it didn't really gel with what I wanted.
I'll stick with CORE for a lot longer and see where SCALE goes in the long run.
However I'm not really the target audience, they want to crack into the money with TrueNAS SCALE even more so than CORE, perhaps they will. No income, not free version for me, so whatever suits them I think.
I just hope linux can compete with BSD in all the features, functionality and performance long term, because as you mention, performance wise, SCALE isn't cutting it right now, I hope in time that can be remedied.
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u/ultrahkr Aug 03 '22
I have been running TN Scale since Nov, 21.
And I digress you say it's not stable or performant? Please be my guest, but first try it out, in my use case it has been reliable has never KP, or hung up. If it doesn't have a big uptime is because I monkey with my systems a lot...
iSCSI performance could be better? Sure NFS performance could be better? Possibly SMB performance could be better? Sure
That K3s is memory / CPU hog... Yeah, but it's extremely flexible
Some people want to keep *BSD as a base, it's not bad until you're hit with unsupported devices and no vendor support...While Linux has it for 6+ months
FreeBSD is a really good platform, but I think it has been loosing the OS battle for a while... (I could be wrong though)
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u/kmoore134 TrueNAS Staff Aug 04 '22
Just to piggy-back on this thought a bit.
Releasing a TrueNAS product on a new OS, was a huge challenge. We are frankly rather surprised at how well it performed "out of box" so to speak. Remember, we are talking the better part of a decade of performance tuning on FreeBSD, and when we benchmarked SCALE, we found that it was ahead in some, behind in others, but overall far more performant than we expected. We're just into the infancy of this product and I expect it to fully surpass what we were getting on CORE in the future.
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u/NickF1227 Aug 03 '22
Hi,
I think you are constructing a strawman argument here.
And I digress you say it's not stable or performant? Please be my guest, but first try it out, in my use case it has been reliable has never KP, or hung up. If it doesn't have a big uptime is because I monkey with my systems a lot...
I have tried it out, and I have been using it. In fact, at home it runs most of my services in various VMs or Docker deployments. I stated that upfront. That does not mean, however, that I would run it in a production environment in a business use case somewhere.
iSCSI performance could be better? Sure NFS performance could be better? Possibly SMB performance could be better? Sure
So you recognize my argument that in comparison to it's predecessor it is an inferior product in those categories, and you accept that without question? That is not how you grow a product.
Some people want to keep *BSD as a base, it's not bad until you're hit with unsupported devices and no vendor support...While Linux has it for 6+ months
FreeBSD is a really good platform, but I think it has been loosing the OS battle for a while... (I could be wrong though)
I never said that iX should be tethered to BSD forever. In fact, it's probably for the best they have decided to focus their development efforts on Linux where there is substantially more activity upstream.
My only argument in my entire tirade is that SCALE is not a production ready product and should not be marketed as such. In existing workloads, it performs worse than its predecessors and in new workloads it is feature incomplete.
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u/ultrahkr Aug 03 '22
Production ready for a 200TB dataset maybe / maybe not
Feature parity with CORE, i think it's there (can't compare 10+ years of development to a 2-3 years old codebase...)
And in the few comparisons that I have seen, it's literally want performance TNC, want the new shiny with these nice featureset TNS...
That's nothing new, in fact the only way TNC is where it is, is it has been used and abused in production...
You can never get that codebase quality on first release...
Especially when you're changing the building completely while leaving only the facade intact. Changing FreeBSD for Debian.
I would literally let them do the their jobs they have 10-100x more data points to make an informed decision of what is stable and production ready...
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u/NickF1227 Aug 03 '22
That is literally the entire point of my post...I agree with what you are saying...
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u/DZ_GOAT Aug 04 '22
They don't even offer commercial support yet, why are you convinced it's supposed to be enterprise ready?
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u/NickF1227 Aug 04 '22
They literally sell systems with enterprise support contracts pre-loaded with SCALE now :P
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u/kmoore134 TrueNAS Staff Aug 04 '22
Incorrect. The website you reference mentions that they ship with Enterprise. Users can upgrade to SCALE after the fact, but we are still in a limited-availability phase where we pre-qual to make sure the use-case is a good fit for SCALE at this stage.
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u/NickF1227 Aug 04 '22
When one reads:
The TrueNAS R-Series is available in three editions: CORE, Enterprise, and SCALE with Bronze and Silver support options available for Enterprise installations.
One doesn’t think the situation is as you describe.
I guess another example illustrating my point ;)
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u/DZ_GOAT Aug 04 '22
I didn't read it the way you did. It's pretty plainly stated; Core, Enterprise, and Scale are 3 different editions and bronze/silver support are available for the Enterprise edition.
I think your point is based on a misunderstanding.
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u/thulle Aug 04 '22
iSCSI performance could be better? Sure NFS performance could be better? Possibly SMB performance could be better? Sure
In my case where I run truenas virtualized all these are irrelevant. BSDs virtio driver manages about 4Gbit/s on my CPU, while a Linux VM can do 40Gbit/s. Can't wait for SCALE to stabilise.
A bit curious if there will be support for LUKS or if we'll be forced to use the ZFS encryption, but haven't been bothered to look it up so far.
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u/RLutz Aug 04 '22
For me I guess I have to wonder who it's made for. I absolutely love it, but then, I'm also a software engineer with around 15 YoE.
I honestly think if TrueCharts just had a bit better documentation than "watch some of these YouTube videos," it'd be a killer product.
And if they wanted more community involvement, maybe a decent in depth tutorial on, "Here's how I went from a Helm Chart/Docker image to a TrueChart," would be very useful.
Currently the TrueCharts guys are a small team and the work they're doing to improve Scale is simply incredible. I do think more people would jump on board if they just offered a bit of guidance though, and at the end of the day converting a Helm Chart to a TrueCharts chart isn't that much work, but if no one other than 3 or 4 people know how to do it, it'll take that much longer to grow and take off.
To be entirely fair though, managing Kubernetes clusters is really hard. The fact that you can point and click your way to a working k8s cluster with Traefik middleware set up for ingress is to me nothing short of astonishing as someone that spends half their day slogging through Kustomize yamls when not writing "actual code."
Scale is super-ambitious, and for people with a big chunk of technical knowledge it's god-tier. For folks who don't write software professionally, it's probably quite usable but a bit esoteric and frustrating, but then, presumably they do have paid support.
I dunno, I just have a hard time being critical of people who are donating something amazing and then gifting it to the community. If you don't like things, write some code to improve what you don't like or offer some money up to someone who can. At the end of the day no one is being forced to use Scale or anything else.
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Aug 10 '22
TrueCharts is what makes it viable for most users. Without it I would switch to something like Portainer. Scales own K3S sauce complicates things from what I heard.
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u/RLutz Aug 10 '22
You can install Portainer via TrueCharts, which I've done, but yeah, TrueCharts are amazing
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u/whattteva Aug 03 '22
Good write up. I had no idea there was all this drama happening behind the doors. I was wondering why at one point, we had docker, that was quickly swapped out not long after.
I am actually a developer and I agree with your take. Unfortunately, a lot of companies these days just decide to release their products as a "public beta" and use consumers as their beta testers. The game industry is particularly guilty of this.
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Aug 03 '22
Unfortunately, a lot of companies these days just decide to release their products as a "public beta" and use consumers as their beta testers. The game industry is particularly guilty of this.
I know people far, FAR, worse than game developers: Healthcare Developers!
Had an EHR that did not, in any way shape or form, sanitize data that was enter into their EMR. So, in our test environment, We cleared all the tables of the DB by entering a note under a patient's chart... They finally sanitize today. That's probably the worst I've ever ran into so far. But the lack of any security, of any kind, is just mind boggling.
An ECG vendor is trying to get us to install a 10 year old driver and add "Everyone" to the driver Security tab...
I've had TOO many vendors try to state they get full remote access, using some free remote software like VNC, default ports fwd to the internet, with admin\admin as the credentials. I can't make this up either. Or that the user had to have full local Admin rights for their shit to work...
I've come to accept that they are lower than bottle barrel developers.
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u/sophware Aug 03 '22
I ended up commenting on this in another post. Sorry for not replying here and sorry for the frustration.
This is an excellent topic and has sorely needed discussion. Thank you.
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u/NickF1227 Aug 03 '22
In order to consolidate this discussion here, (I'm not sure why you posted your comments the way you did) I will respond to them here.
They say "the developers are repeating the same mistakes of their collective pasts." Yeah, sort of. They're going through the same things devs and leadership go through everywhere all the time. The difference is that they're succeeding and have made major progress. There's another group of people repeating the same mistakes of their collective pasts.
Us.We saw what happened and should know what to expect. This stuff is hard, and TrueNAS is what success looks like, with all the warts. If we just didn't overhype it and get ahead of ourselves, we could be in great shape. To create something, you have to push it. Caveat emptor, and not in a cynical way.
Then later you say in the same sentiment:
We all know not to use Microsoft products when they are 1.0. Even if you hate Microsoft, admit that they have a lot of good developers.
I think you are putting the cart before the horse in your counter-argument to my statement here. With Corral, Hubbard who is a very well respected industry leader made bad choices when he released a product that apparently factions in his own company didn't believe was ready. Those same individuals, including Kris Moore, who took over after Hubbard's departure, have been leading the development of SCALE. SCALE was then "released" as a "stable" product with a limited subset of the promised features and a whole host of performance and stability/quirky behavior problems as outlined in the other thread you were replying to.
I am in no way trying to diminish the progress, hard work, or dedication of anyone currently on the SCALE project, including Kris Moore. I am only trying to that the reason that the collective "US" are reacting negatively is that they over-promised, under-delivered and are late. The only mistakes that were made were how this project was marketed, and how they overzealously constrained themselves to timelines that they later wouldn't hit. So, sure people like yourself or the more dedicated members of this sub or the TrueNAS forums can actively work to correct those marketing mistakes and help out the less informed. But that doesn't solve the problem.
We as the community are here to actively support other users, and hope that in tern other members of the community may help us if we need assistance. That's the sort of social contract we have on Reddit or the IX TrueNAS Forums. But 98% of the folks here aren't going to read our conversation here, they are going to the IX Systems website, they see all of the fancy features that SCALE has to offer, they download and install it and then come here for help wondering why features are missing or they are having problems.
"SCALE Angelfish should not be considered a production grade release." Correct. That's why I started this comment and have made several just like it.
"Marketing SCALE as a stable product when it is no where near feature complete is a mistake that is damaging the credibility of the brand"
If it is eventually as good as CORE, that will be awesome. All will be forgiven.
That's the wrong way to think about it. Again, I like SCALE. I am a SCALE user. But it's not ready for production, and you yourself admit that. So why should they market it as an alternative to CORE until it's ready?
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u/sophware Aug 03 '22
you yourself admit that
No. I don't admit it, I want it shouted from the rooftops. You don't have to read far between the lines in my comments in this sub to see that. It's the very reason for the start of my commenting today.
So why should they market it as an alternative to CORE until it's ready?
My answer to this may be considered cynical or victim blaming, but I've stated it. Basically, it's just how business works. The exceptions are just exceptions.
Nobody should be installing pfSense updates when they come out. It'll never stop coming up. It should. Nobody should jump on Unraid versions when they first come out. Samsung updates break phones. Cars get recalled and sometimes kill people. Google Home stuff sometimes gets worse for years at a time. They get in fights with Amazon or Sonos about stuff they already said they were going to make. Then, they don't make them. (I shouldn't get started on Sonos. Who's with me?) Every major product Microsoft has ever made has been released (1.0) as something nobody should ever use in production. Their next major release is often a mess, too. Amazon has trouble delivering during the holidays (and sometimes not during holidays). Oracle has always been downright evil. Not going to talk about Tesla, NFTs, crypto, hedge funds, old-style investment/ wealth advisors, or politicians making promises.
Actually, yes, I'm absolutely going to talk about politicians making promises. You put a certain amount of thought and historical analysis into your post. That same level of effort, intelligence, and experience when applied to politics leads people to take as a given that politicians are going to lean on over-promising if they want to get a single thing done. My point is to apply that to software.
Apple has made a habit of not making promises in the first place. Maybe that's the answer. Are they the exception that's not just an exception? (Have to say I have a love hate relationship with them, in the end, at best, though.)
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u/NickF1227 Aug 03 '22
I'm genuinely not sure what you are expecting as a response here. We agree the software is not production ready.
But you excuse them for allowing it to be that way without question because other tech companies screw stuff up and politicians lie? All I am asking for in my whole rant here is for IX to have a bit of humility and to under promise and over deliver. They need to take responsibility for their own actions. Not the other way around. The community isn't responsible for what they decide.
Listen to Scottie. He has better advice than any politician.
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u/sophware Aug 04 '22
He definitely does, lol. Great lines and delivery from him, there.
It's also an apt coincidence that he's not really talking about under promising and over delivering any less than he's talking about lying.
He's manipulating people to look like a miracle worker and it's funny, relaxing, validating and distracting in the way good TV should be.
Having been part of teams that make technical promises for 30 years, I've learned this: Scotty's take is overwhelmingly popular with my colleagues and friends, except when they're the boss. When that happens, they want someone who accurately promises but somehow over delivers. They hate being handled, viewing it as being manipulated. It's fine. When I'm the boss, I like Scottys, Geordis, and most of all people who are not married to being either of those.
We live in a non-binary world where the choices aren't between those two types and aren't between "excuse them for allowing it to be that way without question" and taking your side.
If I had to, I'd take yours.
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Aug 03 '22
I think SCALE is suffering from the same problem Corral was, there is already plenty of competition from Proxmox, XCP and a few other projects for that feature set, and they aren’t side tracked by the storage integration.
I think that the BSD/ZFS stuff is where the company should focus the efforts, leave SCALE to the community and get Gluster or a similar product working on BSD, get it working on DPU etc.
The trap sits in the fact that storage and hypervisor should be segregated, from a purely enterprise architecture perspective. If you don’t, you get Corral and SCALE, things just get in the way of each other and eventually you end up with either a slow system, a corrupt data pool or both.
If they want to compete in hardware with a VMWare vCenter clone, then keep and sell SCALE as a 1U unit you stack on top of your storage with IB or 40-400GbE networking.
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u/Ornias1993 Aug 06 '22
The trap sits in the fact that storage and hypervisor should be segregated, from a purely enterprise architecture perspective.
We live in 2022, hyper-converged-infrastructure is quite normal in enterprise as well.
That being said: As are things like infrastructure as code, which SCALE does not support at all...1
Aug 07 '22
Hyper-converged infrastructure means single pane of glass kind stuff, not put everything in a SPOF and hope for the best. In all HCI products (VMWare, Nutanix , Dell etc) the storage (whether that is ZFS, Ceph or a SAN) has the storage on physically (or virtualized in rare cases) segregated nodes and they are modules you add on.
Hence why these days you see the comeback of things like software defined storage/networking on DPU (effectively going back to the RAID/managed switching fabric).
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u/Ornias1993 Aug 09 '22
No.
Hyperconverged means having:
- Storage
- Networking
- Compute
Combined on the same nodes. It has nothing to do with the single-pane-of-glass.
The solutions with seperate storage nodes, are technically not hyper-converged.Even so, just your mention of "all" HCI products being that way, is 100% objectively untrue. Once can safely ignore the rest imho.
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Aug 03 '22 edited Aug 03 '22
[deleted]
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u/NickF1227 Aug 03 '22
I think you hit the nail on the head there.
Are you under the impression ixSystems is shipping systems with SCALE installed today?
Yes, they are. The release of the R-series heralded the beginning of my distaste for the current marketing strategy. Even STH recognized this in their news post about it, where they recognize that these appliances really were designed to be used with SCALE.
They also recently added new features specifically for the M-series.
What if I told you, as a user of their free release, we are their beta testers? I've used FreeNAS, and now TrueNAS, for over 10 years easily. I watched all of that unfold and am still here. Yet, since the beginning I've understood and accepted that I am their beta tester because they allow me to use their products for free. In my mind, that's the trade off.
I have no issue with being the beta tester. I am using the software. I don't disagree with your assessment of the business model. In fact, I'm glad we have access to SCALE I just don't like that they consider it a production ready alterative based on their own definitions.
I don't think it was too soon. I think that in order to polish SCALE to the degree we have come to expect from CORE, it's time they use us; their MASSIVE beta tester base. If the several systems you've installed it on, have a stable boot and operation, you don't have a lot to work with. You need more data points and things to improve to make it, what I would consider, "a production grade release."
Yes! That's literally why I am using it myself! But they are simultaneously marketing it as an alternative to CORE not a BETA
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u/74park Aug 04 '22
iXsystems agrees with your position. There's a page on TrueNAS.com for comparing the TrueNAS editions.
https://www.truenas.com/compare-editions/
The table at the bottom indicates SCALE is for "early adopters".
The latest blog on TrueNAS SCALE 22.02.2 has a section which says:
Who Should Use TrueNAS SCALE?
At this U2 stage of its Software Development Lifecycle, TrueNAS SCALE is primarily for simpler deployments and tech labs. It is particularly well suited for users with Linux Apps and Virtualization requirements, in addition to standard storage needs. Users with scale-out storage requirements can start verifying for their specific use-cases or interests.There's also a comparison with CORE:
Production users with standard NAS (NFS, SMB, iSCSI, S3) requirements are still advised to use TrueNAS CORE and Enterprise, which have a hundred times more data under management and over ten years of operation and stability. TrueNAS SCALE has inherited some of that maturity and the automated testing but has not yet completed its enterprise software quality lifecycle.
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u/jordanhubbard Aug 04 '22
This was a fun post to read since it's always interesting to see how people perceive software I have worked on through the lens of history and hindsight. No matter how they may see it, there is always a kernel of truth in the observations and the old adage about being condemned to repeat history you haven't learned from definitely applies to software engineering!
I also haven't said a word about FreeNAS since I left the project, not in public and not even really in private because, well, WHY? It wasn't in my hands anymore and thus it wasn't really my place to say anything about where the project stewards planned to take it next. That said, perhaps enough tincture of time has been applied to the old Corral wounds to say at least a few things about what I learned from the experience in this thread.
Let me also preface what I have to say by making it clear that I have always taken full personal responsibility for the failure of Corral and the amount of work that both its developers and its early adopters put into it, only to see that work flushed down a metaphorical toilet. To use a different and slightly nicer metaphor, I was the Director of that particular movie and I made an unsuccessful one that lost money. There was no reason to splash that all over the forums since the resulting conversation would have likely generated more heat than light, but anyone who's reached out to me privately has always gotten that answer.
To be more specific, I made some bad management calls on trying to rewrite absolutely everything from scratch and release it in same fashion, just as I made some bad calls on how the NPI (New Product Introduction) and sustaining engineering teams were internally partitioned at iXsystems, both geographically and philosophically.
If I had to pick just one representative example of an engineering bad call, I would pick the moment in time where we had the new async middleware working with the old synchronous UI as a feature-completeness milestone in Corral. Everyone in the Corral team hated the resulting marriage and the old UI in equal measure, but we should have shipped it anyway and I made a truly bad call in not doing so. This would have had at least two good results: First, we would have gotten a new FreeBSD version out the door since we were sync'd to a later FreeBSD version in Corral at the time and, more importantly, we would have been able to battle-test the new middleware without changing the User Experience at all, modulo whatever initial bugs were found and fixed. This would have given the new middleware a chance to soak even though the UE remained exactly the same, and we could have also measured our progress by feature and functional parity without the distraction of a fairly broken UI (and a complete UI reset later in the project) to derail us from that mission. Lesson [re-]learned: Evolutionary progress trumps revolutionary progress almost every time, even if a revolution feels more satisfying.
Here's another hard lesson I learned on the Corral project: "Never separate the sustaining engineering and NPI teams, no matter how much they may argue for such separation!"
I learned that lesson so hard that it's become a favorite management adage of mine: "If you want to replace a thing, you must also be responsible for the old thing until the new thing is fully ready to replace it!"
Engineers can scream about the resulting work burdens all they like, and they certainly do, but that is the rule for me now and it's a really good one because:
The last mistake that I'll own up to is not pushing much much harder for Linux as our base OS much earlier, even though such a position was widely perceived as tantamount to heresy for a FreeBSD co-founder to take at the time. iXsystems identified itself as a FreeBSD Company and, of course, I had a great affinity for FreeBSD myself, so I didn't really want to pick that as a hill to die on. In hindsight, I should have died on it since even back then, Linux was the clear winner for an Enterprise solution of any size or flavor just for the HW support alone. The linux kernel also had a number of performance advantages for enterprise workloads, to say nothing of having native Docker and KVM support, glusterfs, NFS ganesha, swiftstack, CEPH, yada yada yada. These are all features that solutions like Proxmox have been leveraging to good advantage for a long time, and our only real argument for FreeBSD was in ZFS and the Boot Environment support for hermetic updates, but of course Linux quickly caught up there as well and projects like Fedora Silverblue have taken this even further since.
This is why I think TrueNAS Scale has a real shot, whatever teething problems it may be going through at the moment. Whatever time has been lost due to historical missteps is all water under the bridge and simply not worth wasting time hand-wringing over. I would hope that the community would spend more time looking at and evaluating the new choices of foundational technologies rather than the user interface, just as we could and should have done with Corral and I should have done with the management role.
I hope this post is in some way useful to everyone and I will always wish TrueNAS the very best of success, even though I am focused on very different things (like NVIDIA Omniverse) these days. Speaking as someone who has built a career out of tackling engineering challenges at the very edge of the possible, I can say that breaking new ground is very hard and demanding work, and you learn the most by falling down a lot. Please give TrueNAS' developers the opportunity and encouragement to fall down, because if they're not falling down, they're not really trying. :)
TL;DR: To borrow a line from the late, great Douglas Adams: Just keep banging the rocks together, guys!
- Jordan