iXsystems, the company developing the distribution for the rapid deployment of network storage FreeNAS and its commercial products based on it, TrueNAS, has released the first stable version of the TrueNAS SCALE distribution, notable for its use of the Linux kernel and Debian package base, whereas all previously released products from this company, including TrueOS (formerly PC-BSD), were based on FreeBSD. Like TrueNAS CORE (FreeNAS), the new product can be downloaded and used for free. The size of the ISO image is 1.5 GB. Development of TrueNAS SCALE-specific build scripts, web interface, and layers is ongoing on GitHub.
Development and support for TrueNAS CORE (FreeNAS) based on FreeBSD will continue — solutions based on FreeBSD and Linux will coexist and complement each other, utilizing a shared codebase of tools and a standard web interface. ZFS (OpenZFS) is used as the file system in TrueNAS SCALE. The provision of an additional edition based on the Linux kernel is explained by the desire to implement some ideas that are unattainable using FreeBSD. Notably, this is not the first such initiative — in 2009, a distribution called OpenMediaVault, which was transitioned to the Linux kernel and Debian package base, was already separated from FreeNAS.
One of the key improvements in TrueNAS SCALE is the ability to create storage deployed across multiple nodes, whereas TrueNAS CORE (FreeNAS) is positioned as a single-node solution. server. In addition to increased scalability, TrueNAS SCALE also features the use of isolated containers, simplification of infrastructure management, and suitability for creating software-defined infrastructures. TrueNAS SCALE supports Docker containers, virtualization based on KVM, and ZFS scaling across multiple nodes using the Gluster distributed file system.
To organize access to storage, SMB, NFS, iSCSI Block Storage, S3 Object API, and Cloud Sync are supported. For secure access, connections can be made via VPN (OpenVPN). Storage can be deployed on a single node and later gradually horizontally scaled by adding additional nodes as needs increase.
In addition to handling tasks related to storage organization, nodes can also be used to provide services and run applications in containers orchestrated by the Kubernetes platform, or in virtual machines based on KVM. There are plans to introduce a catalog of ready-made containers with additional applications such as NextCloud and Jenkins. Future plans also mention support for OpenStack, K8s, KubeVirt, pNFS, Wireguard, scaling filesystem snapshots and replication.
Source: opennet.ru
