I started with FreeNAS several years ago for home use and am now on the latest Core 13 U4. I use it mainly for backups and Plex, so nothing too complicated. Very pleased with its stability and performance. I have no intention of moving to Scale at this stage, but maybe in the future.
Personally also found out that truenass core has a lower idle power usage than truenass scale. Something to keep in mind if u have a home server in the EU
To add more information on this. When the hardware was on core it used 90 W of power. But after the upgrade to scale it uses 125 W idle. Hope it improves in the future with updates.
Hi Tom. I went to TrueNAS Core and have a total of 3 units in my home lab. I have a main unit, a backup unit and then an off-line archive unit which I connect to power, network and bring up to run rsync and shutdown and disconnect again. I have a Supermicro 386 chassis with supermico system board running as my main nas with 16 bays with 12 active. RAIDz2 for all of them, single vdev. Backup is in a silverstone DIY NAS chassis with 9 drives for storage with a supermicro atom based board. Finally I repurposed my QNAP which has an AMD soc as the off-line archive unit. The QNAP is finally being useful. All have mirrored boot. My biggest pool is 30TB for my multimedia (TV show, movies and music). All ripped from my DVDs, CDs no compression, I want all the quality. Music is FLAC. Stability, data robustness and throughput are my main goals.
I work in a hybrid environment; I have a Synology as the ultimate endpoint for backups for my Proxmox VE and storage for ISO images etc. Now I am using Core for music and movie storage, and using some additional applications like Plex. After the Lastpass issues I will move to Jellyfin and I am moving lately more and more towards Docker (vaultwarden in Docker is fine), so my next Truenas implementation will be probably Scale. These videos you make are really helpful, so Tom, thanks for that, your effort is much appreciated.
I was using Core until recently, then I switched to Scale for hardware encoding compatibilitiy with newer Alder Lake CPUs. As polished as the UI is for Scale, I had a bear of a time getting k3s inside scale to work correctly. I did an in place upgrade from Core initially, but it didn't like something in my config and k3s kept refusing to start. I wound up doing a clean install, importing my pool, and then rebuilding all my shares, rsync tasks and replication tasks from scratch. Was a fun Friday night...
I’m using core. I have direct attached fibrechannel arrays and it seems to work for me. Before using core I just had a freebsd install and administering it was getting to be more work than I wanted for a home NAS. After installing core and importing my zfs disks I wondered why I had never done it before.
I went with Core, because I'm running it as a VM under Proxmox (with pass-through HBAs) and Scale only allocates half the assigned RAM to ZFS cache. I didn't want to waste RAM on my VM host, and Core will use almost the full amount of RAM assigned for cache.
TrueNAS core happily runs on my very old QNAP 459 Pro+ hardware. 2GB RAM, Intel Atom D525 @ 1.8GHz ZFS. This is a NAS for home use for Samba and Kodi sharing. I've tried Scale on the same HW and it had issues (due to low RAM and slow CPU). Core runs fine.
I built a NAS a little while ago leveraging TrueNAS Scale but was running into a performance bottleneck with the Atom C3758 (my assumption at the end is with the Linux encryption). Switched to Core (in fact U4 this weekend), and running much better. I hope I can switch to Scale in future though...
I use TrueNAS Core for ZFS storage virtualized in Proxmox to allow easy management of VMs plus Linux features and hardware support. I'd be curious to hear Lawrence Systems thoughts on a setup like this?
_”We don't recommend running any TrueNAS virtualized in general, ZFS likes direct access to your drives for the best operating environment.”_ - Kris Moore, SVP of Engineering at iXsystems. People constantly misrepresent this quote as _”Virtualized TrueNAS should never be used in production“_, but if you read what Kris says closely, there is a key point being made → ZFS should have direct access to the drives. As long as you pass-through your storage _controller_ and not the drives themselves, you will be absolutely fine, regardless of environment. Once the controller is passed through, there is literally no difference between virtual and bare-metal or anything intrinsically special about running TrueNAS in a virtual environment. This topic would make for a great video, and would help to clarify some of the misunderstanding the community has when it comes to running virtual environments properly.
I run scale on my homelab. Upgrade from angelfish to bluefin was a headache, had issues with random crashes and apps and had to fresh install and completely rearchitect my file hierarchy. I'm afraid to upgrade again and break apps again.
I needed this video about 10 days ago! I just upgraded my NAS with all new drives and did a clean install of core 13, then updated to U4 the other day. My previous install (v12) worked fine, but in v13 Plex server will not work. It's is unable to see my media and errors out when trying to update. It seems the Plugin system is pretty outdated and unkept now.
Been using Core and FreeNAS for well over a decade. the Core Plugins and IOCAGE can be a challenge when you rarely modify them on your system. For Plex, V13 works fine.. but instead of trying to update via plugins, go to jails - stop your plex jail, update that jail and then restart. Unless this is a specific U4 bug as I haven't triggered that update... I was waiting for Tom. I will be converting over to Scale... but not quite yet, I'll give it a little more time to mature.
Been using CORE for years as just a NAS for storing all my images of my main photography editing machines along with the rest of the families PC's. Recently I had a MB change to do so thought I would give SCALE a try. My performance tests came up a bit different. iperf3 on SCALE showed a max of around 2.2 gb/s toward the server from my PC but 2.48 back. But CORE showed 2.48 in both directions. If that was not enough to change my mind I then did exactly what Tom did and tested a full image backup of my PC and it was about 10% faster on the CORE machine. I did a direct in place upgrade to minimize any possibility of differences. The other interesting thing I noticed is SCALE would not use more than 8GB of memory for the ZFS cache but CORE used everything it could grab out of the 32GB available. I did prefer the new GUI layout on SCALE and will switch to it someday just not until I don't lose anything. Reporting is still pretty limited in SCALE compared to CORE in disk monitoring didn't check other areas.
I went from core to scale. Only problem is the acl which I don't fully agree with, which I also think is the hardest thing to get over. I have a love for deb base systems, so that's the big reason for the switch. but acl becomes more and more complicated with each update, which also makes me sometimes think about going back to core.
@@nothingincommon when you have to set rights, it has become a nightmare with rights. before you could only add group or user now that list is very long, don't understand why it has to be so much to add group or user.
At work, as a storage/backup target, we're on Core. For the homelab, however, I'm really enjoying running TrueNAS Core in a VM on XCP-ng. I just wish my hardware was a little more flexible or that there was a viable PCI-e NVMe option for boot devices so I can pass the HBA to TrueNAS rather than the individual drives. The only thing that could have gotten me to switch to Scale, is if they would have went with Xenserver instead of KVM. Not that there's anything wrong with KVM. Even better, would have been TrueNAS/BSD as Dom0 on Xen. Best of both worlds!
I had been planning to run Proxmox + Truenas Core but since this is my first home server was worried that might get too complicated so am going with just Scale now. Think it matters?
Another differentiator is whether you need to distribute your filesystem across hosts/hardware. Scale can utilize Gluster where Core has no solution beyond ZFS replication between hosts.
I've got core running as a vm on my unraid server (as well as an instance of opnsense even though i dont have that in use yet, pfsense kept locking me out when i tried to set it up). Unraid handles "all" (like 4) of my dockers, and truenas is just for storage using zfs for *knocks on wood* reliable "backup" which I'm currently having to use as main storage since my pc was acting up and I havnt got it fully going again, just enough to use it, have to figure out the storage drives I had on it (could have possibly been the cause of the "crash" I had).
I'm currently experimenting with core. I have storage andca minecraft server. I'm stuck trying to figure out how to copy the world my buddies and I built to the core MineOS. And then figure out what app to use that has accounts. That can save data to my nas as nd is not a group pool and their own private data. Nextcloud? I have no idea. Will probably switch to Scale soon and give that a shit too. I really wish there was a video on that last part. Because I have no idea if it exists.
Arggggg I updated to it and it messed up with an Error and no more boot had to reinstall it. 🙄 I'm running TrueNAS Core it was just easier to get Plex running truenas scale on the other hand i was lost and it would not work..
I’m running Core as my main file server and use Unraid as my hypervisor for applications, dockers, etc. I’ve learned the hard way not to use Unraid for primary file storage. It’s just too fragile and I’v had vastly better luck with Truenas even on the exact same hardware. Core just works.
I think I'm sticking with core, not necessarily for any good reason other than I trust it slightly more and the applications I do want to run I can just do off a CentOS or Ubuntu server VM.
I have TrueNAS Core on my Dell R520. Why Core? Because it's purely a NAS and it does nothing else than that. For other stuff, I have an ESXi host above it.
I feel much more comfortable with TrueNAS Core, I do not like the slightly different GUI of TrueNAS Scale. For virtualization I run a separate server with xcp-ng, I do not like to mix up things.
I just want a NAS to handle my storage. And I want it to do that task really well. I could not care less about all the extra apps you can install, like virtual machines. I prefer to have dedicated machines for each task and do that task really well. I'm not into all-in-one solutions.
Core is perfect when you're not doing containers. It's just so....*chefs kiss * ... stable
I use core as my main, and scale to replicate to. That way I get to see both environments. Thanks Tom, always enjoy your video.
I started with FreeNAS several years ago for home use and am now on the latest Core 13 U4. I use it mainly for backups and Plex, so nothing too complicated. Very pleased with its stability and performance. I have no intention of moving to Scale at this stage, but maybe in the future.
Personally also found out that truenass core has a lower idle power usage than truenass scale.
Something to keep in mind if u have a home server in the EU
To add more information on this.
When the hardware was on core it used 90 W of power.
But after the upgrade to scale it uses 125 W idle.
Hope it improves in the future with updates.
Strangely for my specific setup, my Core install uses around 8-10W more than my Scale one did. Maybe something for me to look at.
Hi Tom. I went to TrueNAS Core and have a total of 3 units in my home lab. I have a main unit, a backup unit and then an off-line archive unit which I connect to power, network and bring up to run rsync and shutdown and disconnect again. I have a Supermicro 386 chassis with supermico system board running as my main nas with 16 bays with 12 active. RAIDz2 for all of them, single vdev. Backup is in a silverstone DIY NAS chassis with 9 drives for storage with a supermicro atom based board. Finally I repurposed my QNAP which has an AMD soc as the off-line archive unit. The QNAP is finally being useful. All have mirrored boot. My biggest pool is 30TB for my multimedia (TV show, movies and music). All ripped from my DVDs, CDs no compression, I want all the quality. Music is FLAC. Stability, data robustness and throughput are my main goals.
I work in a hybrid environment; I have a Synology as the ultimate endpoint for backups for my Proxmox VE and storage for ISO images etc. Now I am using Core for music and movie storage, and using some additional applications like Plex. After the Lastpass issues I will move to Jellyfin and I am moving lately more and more towards Docker (vaultwarden in Docker is fine), so my next Truenas implementation will be probably Scale.
These videos you make are really helpful, so Tom, thanks for that, your effort is much appreciated.
I was using Core until recently, then I switched to Scale for hardware encoding compatibilitiy with newer Alder Lake CPUs.
As polished as the UI is for Scale, I had a bear of a time getting k3s inside scale to work correctly.
I did an in place upgrade from Core initially, but it didn't like something in my config and k3s kept refusing to start. I wound up doing a clean install, importing my pool, and then rebuilding all my shares, rsync tasks and replication tasks from scratch.
Was a fun Friday night...
I'm using Core at home, I've been pretty happy with it for the last half year.
hey, my path was Core bare metal -> Scale bare metal -> Proxmox with Core virtualized (passthrough HBA with all drives)
Yes, please talk about Docker storage on Core. Doesn’t look like you’re using a zvol for iSCSI, so eager to know what you’re doing.
I’m using core. I have direct attached fibrechannel arrays and it seems to work for me.
Before using core I just had a freebsd install and administering it was getting to be more work than I wanted for a home NAS. After installing core and importing my zfs disks I wondered why I had never done it before.
I went with Core, because I'm running it as a VM under Proxmox (with pass-through HBAs) and Scale only allocates half the assigned RAM to ZFS cache. I didn't want to waste RAM on my VM host, and Core will use almost the full amount of RAM assigned for cache.
Yes, that will change shortly. Atm scale can just use 50% RAM for zfs cache.
Thoughts on running Core inside a hypervisor alongside other VMs vs just running Scale?
I'd stick to CORE for work/enterprise scenarios; haven't tried SCALE yet, but i guess is a great option for the homelab setup
SCALE's reporting is trash....right now I do not deploy scale at any client until the reporting is on par with Core
@@hescominsoon I agree. I setup two identical servers of each… while there is some nice things in Scale, I feel Core is more consistent and usable.
@@deamonkai scale is a replication target in my lab right now. The lack of reporting makes it a no-go for me right now....:)
TrueNAS core happily runs on my very old QNAP 459 Pro+ hardware. 2GB RAM, Intel Atom D525 @ 1.8GHz ZFS. This is a NAS for home use for Samba and Kodi sharing. I've tried Scale on the same HW and it had issues (due to low RAM and slow CPU). Core runs fine.
I built a NAS a little while ago leveraging TrueNAS Scale but was running into a performance bottleneck with the Atom C3758 (my assumption at the end is with the Linux encryption). Switched to Core (in fact U4 this weekend), and running much better. I hope I can switch to Scale in future though...
Well presented, thank you!
i would love a video on how you have setup your storage for docker containers; and how you store the docker images; docker data/config for them
I use TrueNAS Core for ZFS storage virtualized in Proxmox to allow easy management of VMs plus Linux features and hardware support. I'd be curious to hear Lawrence Systems thoughts on a setup like this?
Virutalized TrueNAS is find for labs but should never be used in production.
_”We don't recommend running any TrueNAS virtualized in general, ZFS likes direct access to your drives for the best operating environment.”_ - Kris Moore, SVP of Engineering at iXsystems.
People constantly misrepresent this quote as _”Virtualized TrueNAS should never be used in production“_, but if you read what Kris says closely, there is a key point being made → ZFS should have direct access to the drives.
As long as you pass-through your storage _controller_ and not the drives themselves, you will be absolutely fine, regardless of environment. Once the controller is passed through, there is literally no difference between virtual and bare-metal or anything intrinsically special about running TrueNAS in a virtual environment.
This topic would make for a great video, and would help to clarify some of the misunderstanding the community has when it comes to running virtual environments properly.
Thank you for your input. I will have to take a hard look at how I am doing things.
I run scale on my homelab. Upgrade from angelfish to bluefin was a headache, had issues with random crashes and apps and had to fresh install and completely rearchitect my file hierarchy. I'm afraid to upgrade again and break apps again.
I needed this video about 10 days ago! I just upgraded my NAS with all new drives and did a clean install of core 13, then updated to U4 the other day. My previous install (v12) worked fine, but in v13 Plex server will not work. It's is unable to see my media and errors out when trying to update. It seems the Plugin system is pretty outdated and unkept now.
Been using Core and FreeNAS for well over a decade. the Core Plugins and IOCAGE can be a challenge when you rarely modify them on your system. For Plex, V13 works fine.. but instead of trying to update via plugins, go to jails - stop your plex jail, update that jail and then restart. Unless this is a specific U4 bug as I haven't triggered that update... I was waiting for Tom. I will be converting over to Scale... but not quite yet, I'll give it a little more time to mature.
Been using CORE for years as just a NAS for storing all my images of my main photography editing machines along with the rest of the families PC's. Recently I had a MB change to do so thought I would give SCALE a try. My performance tests came up a bit different. iperf3 on SCALE showed a max of around 2.2 gb/s toward the server from my PC but 2.48 back. But CORE showed 2.48 in both directions. If that was not enough to change my mind I then did exactly what Tom did and tested a full image backup of my PC and it was about 10% faster on the CORE machine. I did a direct in place upgrade to minimize any possibility of differences. The other interesting thing I noticed is SCALE would not use more than 8GB of memory for the ZFS cache but CORE used everything it could grab out of the 32GB available. I did prefer the new GUI layout on SCALE and will switch to it someday just not until I don't lose anything. Reporting is still pretty limited in SCALE compared to CORE in disk monitoring didn't check other areas.
I have seen the only-use-half-the-RAM on the truenas forum before. Seems a Linux (kernel?) issue
I think I'd go with Core for stability. If I understood right in your comparison video, I'd like the speed.
I went from core to scale. Only problem is the acl which I don't fully agree with, which I also think is the hardest thing to get over. I have a love for deb base systems, so that's the big reason for the switch. but acl becomes more and more complicated with each update, which also makes me sometimes think about going back to core.
What's ACL? Access control list?
@@nothingincommon when you have to set rights, it has become a nightmare with rights. before you could only add group or user now that list is very long, don't understand why it has to be so much to add group or user.
At work, as a storage/backup target, we're on Core.
For the homelab, however, I'm really enjoying running TrueNAS Core in a VM on XCP-ng. I just wish my hardware was a little more flexible or that there was a viable PCI-e NVMe option for boot devices so I can pass the HBA to TrueNAS rather than the individual drives.
The only thing that could have gotten me to switch to Scale, is if they would have went with Xenserver instead of KVM. Not that there's anything wrong with KVM. Even better, would have been TrueNAS/BSD as Dom0 on Xen. Best of both worlds!
I had been planning to run Proxmox + Truenas Core but since this is my first home server was worried that might get too complicated so am going with just Scale now.
Think it matters?
Another differentiator is whether you need to distribute your filesystem across hosts/hardware. Scale can utilize Gluster where Core has no solution beyond ZFS replication between hosts.
Right now, the last time I saw the road map Gloucester has not been implemented yet. Are you actually using it at the moment?
I've got core running as a vm on my unraid server (as well as an instance of opnsense even though i dont have that in use yet, pfsense kept locking me out when i tried to set it up). Unraid handles "all" (like 4) of my dockers, and truenas is just for storage using zfs for *knocks on wood* reliable "backup" which I'm currently having to use as main storage since my pc was acting up and I havnt got it fully going again, just enough to use it, have to figure out the storage drives I had on it (could have possibly been the cause of the "crash" I had).
I'm currently experimenting with core. I have storage andca minecraft server. I'm stuck trying to figure out how to copy the world my buddies and I built to the core MineOS. And then figure out what app to use that has accounts. That can save data to my nas as nd is not a group pool and their own private data. Nextcloud? I have no idea. Will probably switch to Scale soon and give that a shit too. I really wish there was a video on that last part. Because I have no idea if it exists.
Arggggg I updated to it and it messed up with an Error and no more boot had to reinstall it. 🙄
I'm running TrueNAS Core it was just easier to get Plex running truenas scale on the other hand i was lost and it would not work..
I’m running Core as my main file server and use Unraid as my hypervisor for applications, dockers, etc. I’ve learned the hard way not to use Unraid for primary file storage. It’s just too fragile and I’v had vastly better luck with Truenas even on the exact same hardware. Core just works.
Do you have TrueNAS Core and Unraid existing in the same box?
I think I'm sticking with core, not necessarily for any good reason other than I trust it slightly more and the applications I do want to run I can just do off a CentOS or Ubuntu server VM.
I like the UI of TrueNAS Scale better. I run a couple VMs on it, but mostly it's just my media storage and storage for Proxmox ISOs and VM Backups.
Thanks so much.
I have Core running a Ubuntu VM for docker which has been really reliable so I don't really need Scale for the apps.
Running Core at home on the IX Mini or whatever it is. Seems to work for what I want. XCPNG runs all my VM etc.
Crazy question, couldn’t I run tiny 10 and share the hdd’s with specific log in credentials? Couldn’t I run a program to mirror the drives?
I don't know what tiny 10
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS windows 10, but completely stripped down. No bloatware, nothing.
I have TrueNAS Core on my Dell R520. Why Core? Because it's purely a NAS and it does nothing else than that. For other stuff, I have an ESXi host above it.
I feel like I should have gone with scale but was just getting my toes in the water as this was my first foray into dedicated storage.
I feel much more comfortable with TrueNAS Core, I do not like the slightly different GUI of TrueNAS Scale. For virtualization I run a separate server with xcp-ng, I do not like to mix up things.
I just want a NAS to handle my storage. And I want it to do that task really well.
I could not care less about all the extra apps you can install, like virtual machines.
I prefer to have dedicated machines for each task and do that task really well.
I'm not into all-in-one solutions.
Who's the intro music artist?
Sounds very familiar to a track I used to use in 2005
Doesn't Jay use the same thing for Learning Linux?
I have two core for storage and one scale in a proxmox play/test box
what about using truenas scale as an iscsi target in small to medium business running as SAN (virtualisation target)?
That works, all though prefer NFS
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS is NFS comparable to iSCSI for random iops (needed for virtualised workloads)
Yes th-cam.com/video/qfAnbK5hKbE/w-d-xo.html
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS 🙏🙏🙏
Im with CORE, I virtulise my nas ontop of proxmox so i don't need any of the application features. Just a good ol file storage server
ESXI exists for a reason. You even said, everyone separates their storage from their vm compute platforms. Too many reasons why to list here.
So enterprises don’t normally run Plex media servers?
Most enterprises do not, Lastpass being a notable exception.
All of the above.
Core for storage. Scale for not storage but needs UI. Debian for everything else.
for me, truenas CORE is the way to go. Boring is exciting!