After a year and a half of development, iXsystems presented the release of TrueNAS CORE 13, a distribution for rapid deployment of Network-Attached Storage (NAS).
This new version of TrueNAS 13.0 has all the same services and middleware as TrueNAS 12.0 with improvements in security, availability, quality, performance and includes more than 270 bug fixes and improvements. Notable areas of improvement in TrueNAS 13.0 include OpenZFS 2.1, FreeBSD 13.0, Samba 4.15, and more.
TrueNAS CORE stands out because it is based on the FreeBSD 13 codebase, with built-in ZFS support and web-based management built on the Django Python framework.
FTP, NFS, Samba, AFP, rsync and iSCSI are supported to organize storage access, software RAID (0,1,5) can be used to increase storage reliability, LDAP/Active Directory support is implemented for the client's authorization.
Key innovations in TrueNAS CORE 13.0
In this new version of the distribution that is presented, it is highlighted that the ZFS file system implementation upgraded to OpenZFS 2.1 and the content of the environment base was synchronized with FreeBSD 13.1. It should be noted that the transition to the FreeBSD 13 branch and the added optimizations made it possible to achieve a performance increase of up to 20% on large NAS.
Another novelty of this new version is that significantly reduced ZFS pool import time due to parallelization of operations. Reboot and failover times on large systems have been reduced by more than 80%.
For NFS it is mentioned that the support for nconnect mode, which allows you to spread the load across multiple established connections to the server. On high-speed networks, thread parallelization can improve performance by up to 4 times.
On the other hand, it also highlights the implementation of version 4.15 of Samba which has significant security enhancements and virtual file system enhancements that ensure SMB support is secure and robust.
The TrueNAS 12.0 and TrueNAS 13.0 users also have the option to migrate to TrueNAS SCALE, which also supports Samba 4.15, NFS nconnect, and OpenZFS 2.1 (plus other features), but is based on Debian Bullseye and not FreeBSD.
Currently, the distribution is in its version TrueNAS SCALE 22.02.1, which differs from TrueNAS CORE by using the Linux kernel and the base of the Debian package. FreeBSD and Linux based solutions co-exist and complement each other through a common tool codebase and generic web interface.
Providing an additional edition based on the Linux kernel is due to the desire to implement some ideas that are unattainable using FreeBSD. For example, TrueNAS SCALE supports Kubernetes applications, KVM hypervisor, REST APIs, and Glusterfs.
The new version of TrueNAS SCALE has migrated to OpenZFS 2.1 and Samba 4.15, added support for NFS nconnect, included Netdata monitoring application, added support for self-encrypting disks, improved group management interface, improved support for uninterruptible power supplies, extended Gluster and cluster SMB API
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- The user interface provides the ability to view the virtual machine logs.
- Support for grouping sections with accounts, storages, network settings, applications, settings, reports, and many other sections has been added to the UI.
- Updated iconik and Asigra plugins.
- iSCSI Target performance has been improved and I/O efficiency has also been improved.
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about it of this new version, you can check the details in the following link
Download and get TrueNAS CORE 13
For those who are interested in being able to obtain the image of this new version of TrueNAS CORE 13, they can do it directly from its official website.
The system iso image size is 900 MB (x86_64) and you can get the image from this link.