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TrueNAS 24.10 “Electric Eel” Powers Up Your Storage

✇TrueNAS
By: Václav Navrátil

After a tremendously successful and widely deployed BETA and RC, we’re pleased to announce that TrueNAS 24.10 “Electric Eel” has reached its official RELEASE version today, and is downloadable now from truenas.com/download-truenas-scale/ or by selecting to upgrade from within your existing SCALE installation.

Electric Eel succeeds Dragonfish (24.04.2.3), which is widely adopted in both Community and Enterprise installations. Dragonfish has become the most deployed version of TrueNAS, surpassing 13.0. TrueNAS 24.04 is also recommended for Mission-Critical deployments with significantly improved security and faster failover capabilities.

With over 9000 testers in our pre-release period, it’s no secret that Electric Eel is our most-anticipated release yet, and with good reason – it’s packed with several long-anticipated features like Docker Compose, both on the surface and under the hood, so let’s dig right in.

RAIDZ Expansion Is Here

One of the sticking points that we’ve heard from our community for years was the limitation that OpenZFS wasn’t able to expand its parity-based RAIDZ layouts by a single drive at a time.

After several years of intense development, testing, and debugging, we’re proud to announce that you can now pair the legendary resilience of OpenZFS with the easy expansion of conventional RAID solutions – drive-at-a-time expand is here.

Systems can be expanded online, one drive at a time, with no interruption in service – regardless of whether you’re using single, double, or triple-parity protection.

Traditional expansion using full vdevs is still available as before, and is the preferred method, but the new single-drive expansion offers new flexibility for smaller systems that may not have as many available drive bays.

Docker Touches Down with Improved Apps Handling

Since the initial launch of TrueNAS SCALE, Apps have played a major role in its adoption and flexibility.

Being able to run applications directly on the same system as their storage allows for both small “micro-service” style apps to leverage available power on a server, and for I/O-intensive applications to cut out network latency entirely from their workflow.

TrueNAS 24.10 migrates the previous Kubernetes-based Application back-end to the simpler Docker Compose solution, while seamlessly migrating and preserving the data of existing App installations.

If we haven’t built your preferred application out in our easy-to-install App catalog yet, or you’d like to customize it for your own specific needs, TrueNAS 24.10 also has full support for custom YAML config files (with the exception of individual IP addresses per application – coming in a post-release update) allowing you to import any of the hundreds of thousands of public Docker applications.

Want still more customization? Install the Dockge or Portainer runtimes on top of TrueNAS, directly from our App catalog – and tweak to your heart’s content.

For those who still want to leverage Kubernetes applications, a Kubernetes runtime can still be installed into a containerized or virtualized solution directly on TrueNAS; however, the primary method of App development and delivery will be through Docker and Docker Compose.

Fast Dedup Breaks Cover

Over a year ago, the TrueNAS development team and Klara Systems, along with members of the OpenZFS community, embarked on a journey to improve the data-reduction capabilities of OpenZFS through the Fast Deduplication project.

Several use cases can benefit from deduplication, including virtualization and office file storage where files may be copied to multiple locations by end-users; however, with the legacy OpenZFS deduplication algorithms, the overhead of maintaining the deduplication metadata tables in-memory at all times led to performance challenges and usability issues at scale.

Fast Dedup addresses these issues with multiple adjustments, including a more efficient metadata structure, a log-based write queue, and pruning of non-duplicate entries – all of which combine to shrink the memory footprint of deduplication by up to 90% in many scenarios.

The Fast Dedup feature is now ready for testing in TrueNAS 24.10, but is not recommended for serious production use at this time. We expect to provide testing results and any necessary code improvements in early 2025.

Global Search and Customizable Dashboard Widgets

Our new global UI search option helps you get to the settings you want faster than ever before. With just a few keystrokes, find the page you want, go there with a single click, and helpful highlights will appear to guide your eyes to the correct form, button, or area to explore next.

Can’t find what you want or need to dig deeper? Use the same menu to search the TrueNAS Docs site for more information. You can also use the new TrueNAS AI Search tool to ask more conversational questions and generate solutions to specific TrueNAS problems.

Usability and customization go hand-in-hand. While the TrueNAS team has designed a default dashboard with essential information, we know users have unique needs.

With our new customizable dashboard, you can place your most crucial information front and center, ready the moment you log in.

TrueNAS H-Series Gains NVMe Support

This spring, we launched the newest member of our TrueNAS Enterprise hardware family, the versatile TrueNAS H-Series, the perfect vehicle for delivering the power of TrueNAS in a compact, power-efficient package.

Now, the H-Series gets a jolt of extra horsepower from the release of TrueNAS 24.10 with the enabling of NVMe storage options on all twelve bays, bringing the maximum capacity of the H-Series to 360 TB using twelve 30 TB NVMe drives.

This new functionality is ready to be enabled in the field with an upgrade to Electric Eel; no controller replacement or component swaps needed. This tri-mode (SAS & NVMe) capability with High Availability is relatively unique in a 2U cost-effective platform.

New TrueNAS H-Series units configured with NVMe drives will ship with TrueNAS 24.10 already installed; existing TrueNAS Enterprise customers looking to take advantage of NVMe on H-Series platforms should reach out to our Support team to discuss an upgrade path that fits their needs.

Ready When You Are

The initial version, TrueNAS 24.10.0, is released and ready to download immediately.

Keep an eye on the Software Status page to see when your use case aligns with the new version, and when you’re ready, join the thousands of users already powering up with Electric Eel by downloading the installer or upgrading from within the TrueNAS UI; and don’t forget to stop by the TrueNAS Forums to share your knowledge and experience.

Join today and help others unlock the power of True Data Freedom with TrueNAS.

The post TrueNAS 24.10 “Electric Eel” Powers Up Your Storage appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

TrueNAS Delivers the Industry’s First Integration of OpenZFS 2.3

✇TrueNAS
By: Václav Navrátil

TrueNAS uses OpenZFS as the foundation for its data management layer and is the deployment vehicle for the majority of OpenZFS storage systems used today. Here at TrueNAS, we love OpenZFS, and it continues to improve with the branching of OpenZFS 2.3 on October 4th, 2024.

The TrueNAS Engineering team has been significantly contributing to the codebase of OpenZFS 2.3, and Electric Eel (TrueNAS 24.10) includes several new and long-anticipated OpenZFS 2.3 features. The current development version of TrueNAS, “Fangtooth”, aligns with the full OpenZFS 2.3 release and will use this version of OpenZFS throughout its version lifecycle.

With every new version of both TrueNAS and OpenZFS, additional features, test cases, and bug fixes are included. The previous OpenZFS 2.2 brought dRAID and block cloning to TrueNAS Dragonfish (24.04) and CORE 13.3. TrueNAS 24.10 adds a number of new features, including two highly anticipated enhancements: Fast Dedup and RAIDZ expansion.

This blog highlights these new capabilities and their status within TrueNAS.

Fast Dedup Development is Complete

Deduplication is highly desirable for many workloads, including virtualization and several file storage use cases. Where there is naturally a high ratio of redundant data within a pool, deduplication effectively increases the usable capacity of the drives and the efficiency of the Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC) and Level 2 ARC (L2ARC).

One of the primary challenges with traditional ZFS deduplication has been keeping the large deduplication metadata tables in memory at all times to avoid significant performance penalties. This existing functionality was not performant and led to usability issues during operation. As the size of the deduplication tables increased, the ZFS ARC would shrink, and performance would degrade as the pool filled, leading to a poor user experience and challenges when scaling to higher storage capacities.

With the inclusion of Fast Dedup, the metadata size can now be automatically constrained to fit in either primary RAM or dedicated flash devices to avoid hitting the performance penalty wall. In addition, the metadata structure for Fast Dedup has been completely re-engineered to enable efficient updates and the ability to prune non-duplicate blocks, effectively shrinking the memory footprint of the deduplication tables by 90% in many cases.

Combining these metadata improvements with properly configured storage will improve deduplication performance by an order of magnitude for larger systems. Performance is more stable as the pool is filled, leading to predictable behavior and enhanced space-efficiency.

This Fast Dedup project started in 2023 and was committed to the OpenZFS project as a “Valentine’s Day Gift” in 2024. Allan Jude and Klara Systems collaborated with Alexander Motin and the TrueNAS Engineering team along with members of the OpenZFS community, and development was completed in September of this year. We appreciate the hard work and dedication shown by all contributors and testers to help bring this project through to completion.

With development completed, Fast Dedup is now ready for testing but not yet suggested for serious production use. Within TrueNAS, it is marked as Experimental. We expect to provide test results along with any necessary code improvements in early 2025.

RAIDZ Expansion is Finally Available

A much-anticipated feature for smaller systems and home users of TrueNAS, RAIDZ expansion allows a small pool (e.g., a single RAIDZ vdev) to be gradually expanded with one drive at a time. Existing data is preserved with its original parity level and rewritten across all drives, while new data is written with the new parity configuration. This simplified administrative process gives smaller TrueNAS systems the flexibility to expand in single drive increments, rather than adding a full vdev of drives. The same expansion feature works regardless of the parity level used – RAIDZ1, Z2, or Z3 – but cannot migrate between protection levels.

The expansion process is done while the ZFS pool is online, similar to the resilvering process when a drive fails and is replaced. Once completed, the larger pool’s full performance is available. The new disk is used immediately, with additional capacity being reclaimed as existing data is rewritten.

This project took several years to complete and test, will be included in OpenZFS 2.3, and is available now in TrueNAS 24.10. TrueNAS sponsored this work to benefit smaller systems and is fully supported within TrueNAS Electric Eel.

OpenZFS Direct IO Improves NVMe Performance

Direct IO is one of the latest features included in OpenZFS 2.3 and was provided by Los Alamos Labs. It provides the option to bypass the ARC when storing data directly on NVMe drives. Removing memory copies can increase a system’s bandwidth by over 30%. The primary use case for Direct IO is storing checkpoint data in High-Performance Computing (HPC) clusters. This specific use case sees very little benefit from the read caching of the ZFS ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache).

The Direct IO feature will only be available via Fangtooth. We are looking forward to testing for use cases that benefit our customers. Most workloads, however, will continue to benefit significantly from the default settings with ARC fully enabled.

What else is in TrueNAS 24.10?

In addition to the major features highlighted above, TrueNAS 24.10 includes an upgraded and improved webUI, enhancements to cloud backup integration, the replacement of Kubernetes with Docker for TrueNAS Apps, improved hardware support and drivers, and much more. For more details, see the Release Notes and join the discussion on the TrueNAS Forums, where some of the over 5,000 testers of 24.10 pre-release versions are sharing their feedback and tips.

TrueNAS 24.10 “Electric Eel” is planned for formal release near the end of October 2024. Want to learn more about TrueNAS solutions in your business? Contact us to speak to a product specialist, and find out how to harness the power of open source storage.

The post TrueNAS Delivers the Industry’s First Integration of OpenZFS 2.3 appeared first on TrueNAS - Welcome to the Open Storage Era.

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