storage

FreeNAS to TrueNAS upgrade

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A while ago I posted my home storage server build which at the time was setup to run FreeNAS. Things have moved on in that space and FreeNAS has been replaced with TrueNAS Core. I thought I would post my FreeNAS to TrueNAS upgrade experience.

First off the recommendation is to ensure you’re on the latest FreeNAS version (the last official release, which was FreeNAS 11.3-U5). I had already been running this version for a while so I was set there.

FreeNAS to TrueNAS Upgrade Process

I started off by creating a full, manual backup of all my storage pools to an external disk. I verified a bunch of files in various locations on the backup disk to be extra sure they looked good.

Next was to switch release trains to TrueNAS-12.0-STABLE. At the time of posting, the current release is TrueNAS-12.0-U8.

freenas to truenas upgrade release train

Clicking Download Updates started the download and upgrade process. Before starting you’re offered the chance to download your configuration backup. Definitely do this. It contains all your configuration as well as an optional password secret seed. This is important if you need to re-install the OS or change to a new boot device.

Once the upgrade completes the UI should reconnect after reboot, showing off the shiny new dashboard.

freenas to truenas upgrade - the new dashboard

Updating ZFS Feature Flags

After verifying I could still access my SMB shares and that my NFS provisioner for my Kubernetes cluster was still working as expected I decided to lock in TrueNAS 12.0 by updating my ZFS pool feature flags across all zpools.

In a shell, I ran zpool status to take a look. Each pool is listed and should shows that some new features are not yet enabled. By leaving them as is, you retain the ability to roll back to your old FreeNAS version. Updating them locks you into the ZFS version that they were introduced with.

Updating to use the latest feature flags is something you should personally decide on. Do you need the newer feature flags?

According to this post, TrueNAS 12.0 supports the Feature Flags listed below. (Bold are read-only backwards compatible, and italicized flags are very easy to return to the enabled state):

  • Allocation Classes
  • Bookmarks v2
  • Bookmark written
  • Sequential Rebuilds [device_rebuild]
  • Encryption
  • Large dnodes
  • Livelist
  • Log Spacemap
  • Project Quota
  • Redacted datasets
  • Redaction bookmarks
  • Resilver defer
  • Userobj accounting
  • zstd compression

Updating ZFS feature flags is then as simple as running the zpool upgrade command.

E.g. sudo zpool upgrade my-pool

zfs feature flags updated

The last step is to upgrade any jails you might be running. Use the iocage upgrade command to get going with.

iocage upgrade -r 12.0-RELEASE your_jail_name

Backblaze storage pods – excellent value for money storage in the datacenter

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I know this is old now, but a while back I came across this blog post by the company Backblaze. They detail how they build these custom “storage pods” that get rack mounted in their datacenter for online storage. In their post, they show how using this method they manage to save tons of money that would have been otherwise spent on Amazon S3 storage, EMC / Dell or Sun solutions. Each storage pod can be looked at as one building block of a much larger storage solution.

I think this design is great and if I had the space / resources I would defintely attempt one of these as a project for myself. To quote their site, the storage pods contain the following hardware:

“one pod contains one Intel Motherboard with four SATA cards plugged into it. The nine SATA cables run from the cards to nine port multiplier backplanes that each have five hard drives plugged directly into them (45 hard drives in total).”

Here is a youtube video showing the design of one storage pod.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm7Rp5u8Q1g&feature=player_embedded

Read up more at Backblaze blog