Announcing TrueCommand

Kris Moore

SVP of Engineering
Administrator
Moderator
iXsystems
Joined
Nov 12, 2015
Messages
1,448
Hello FreeNAS Community!

We are pleased to announce the first public beta of our new product, TrueCommand! TrueCommand is a powerful “single pane of glass” iXsystems NAS management application that controls an entire fleet of TrueNAS and FreeNAS systems from a single location.

TrueCommand key features:
  • Provides Single Sign-On (SSO) for your entire iXsystems NAS fleet
  • Consolidated monitoring and reporting with predictive analytics
  • Team-based operations with Role Based Access Control (RBAC)
  • Easy deployment as a VM or on bare metal
  • Simple user interface based on the Angular UI framework

TrueCommand works with FreeNAS and TrueNAS versions 11.2 or later.

For more details on TrueCommand:
TrueCommand manages FreeNAS and TrueNAS installations with up to 50 drives for free. Please try TrueCommand and let us know what you think. We look forward to your feedback by email or ticket!

Kris Moore
Vice President of Engineering
 
Last edited:

sretalla

Powered by Neutrality
Moderator
Joined
Jan 1, 2016
Messages
9,702
That certainly looks interesting as a concept. I'll be trying it out.
 

Ericloewe

Server Wrangler
Moderator
Joined
Feb 15, 2014
Messages
20,175
The datasheet doesn't seem to be publicly available.
 

Yorick

Wizard
Joined
Nov 4, 2018
Messages
1,912
I think I'd love to see TrueCommand evolve into an HCI orchestrator. Now that'd be something. I do realize that ZFS has no concept of "cross-box redundancy" and that would need to be introduced to be able to do HCI.
 

Geek Baba

Explorer
Joined
Sep 2, 2011
Messages
73
Hello FreeNAS Community!
TrueCommand manages FreeNAS and TrueNAS installations with up to 50 drives for free. Please try TrueCommand and let us know what you think. We look forward to your feedback by email or ticket!

Kris Moore
Vice President of Engineering

Is it 50 drives per freenas instance or total 50 drive across multiple systems...
 

Chris Moore

Hall of Famer
Joined
May 2, 2015
Messages
10,080
TrueCommand manages FreeNAS and TrueNAS installations with up to 50 drives for free.
While this is interesting in concept, what do you do above 50 drives because I have 124 drives in just one system at work...

I almost have more than 50 drives at home. Lucky for me my 48 bay chassis and 24 bay chassis are not both full. I guess I will need to upgrade so I can try this out.
 

sretalla

Powered by Neutrality
Moderator
Joined
Jan 1, 2016
Messages
9,702
I have to say it looks like a noble idea and after a 10 minute tyre-kicking exercise, I can see some promise in it... but a long way to go to really leverage what's surely possible.

For the final version... a plugin perhaps? or is the idea to keep it outside of the monitoring context? (I guess the FreeBSD 12 dependency is what's driven the VM for now at least?)
 

Jeremy

TrueNAS Marketing Team
iXsystems
Joined
Jun 7, 2013
Messages
89
I have to say it looks like a noble idea and after a 10 minute tyre-kicking exercise, I can see some promise in it... but a long way to go to really leverage what's surely possible.

Yeah? What else is on your wish list?
 

sretalla

Powered by Neutrality
Moderator
Joined
Jan 1, 2016
Messages
9,702
At the moment, the interface feels like it's a bit sterile... I can hardly click anywhere and have it give me more detail on that thing... I need to hunt around for where I can click and see more.

Things like hardware (drive temperatures, SMART data) would be great to see somewhere (maybe just didn't find that yet).

It would be super useful if the IP address in the top right of the summary card didn't cut off the last octet or so, meaning I can't see the 1 unique part of the address I need to know.

I guess configuring the services will come later (just stop and start for now it seems).

I don't see any good way to start/stop services on all servers in a group... might be useful for some... will need to ponder it more, but I guess some other items may be useful to do by group if that were allowed (reporting on settings for compliance reasons perhaps, like is SSH disabled for all servers in the DMZ group?).

I'm sure more will come to mind after a bit more use and triggered by the feedback from others...

I don't want to come across as a critic... it's great something has arrived in this area at all! (but I always enjoy making things better)
 

sretalla

Powered by Neutrality
Moderator
Joined
Jan 1, 2016
Messages
9,702
To pre-empt the group, yes I know it was a bad example to use DMZ... no FreeNAS in DMZs, but I hope my point was clear enough anyway.
 

sretalla

Powered by Neutrality
Moderator
Joined
Jan 1, 2016
Messages
9,702
Also, in setting up the mailserver, my internal relay host has no auth... seems you don't let me do that.
 

CaraquetFlyer

Dabbler
Joined
Feb 6, 2019
Messages
13
I really like the TrueCommand, it will be great use on an office Smart TV so we can have a quick look at stats just like Munin, Zabbix, etc.

  1. Need to be able to add a FreeNAS using a custom port. I have a system on port 8000 and can't add it as it says "invalid IP or Hostname".
  2. What is the user we have created in the installation used for? I tried to use it on first login but didn't work
  3. SMTP on port 465 doesn't seems to be working on TLS but I need to find a way to go into SSH but also not working. I've tried every user and password I've created in the installation and made sure SSH was enable. Even tried with IP and hostname but no luck,
 

Chris Moore

Hall of Famer
Joined
May 2, 2015
Messages
10,080
Joined
Jul 3, 2015
Messages
926
Compatibility with FreeNAS 11.1-U7
I second that. 11.1-U7 is clearly the stable version atm and probably will be for at least the rest of the year so would be nice to test it with that.
 

kenmoore

TrueCommand Project Lead
iXsystems
Joined
May 1, 2019
Messages
51
11.1 support will never happen.
TrueCommand requires a high level of interoperability with the FreeNAS middleware and the 11.1 middleware has no concept of the types of interactions that TrueCommand needs. The middleware in 11.2 provides most of the functionality needed for TrueCommand, but there are a lot of new features coming with the 11.3 middleware specifically for TrueCommand to start offering a fair bit more integrations/features.
 

kenmoore

TrueCommand Project Lead
iXsystems
Joined
May 1, 2019
Messages
51

Chris Moore

Hall of Famer
Joined
May 2, 2015
Messages
10,080
11.1 support will never happen.
Then you need to work on the wasted space problems and the high number of clicks required to get things done.
The 11.2 GUI takes too much screen real estate with wasteful padding and eye candy.
One of my production servers at work has 124 data drives in the pool. Do a comparison between looking at that in the new UI vs the old UI.
Usability needs to be the focus.
 

kenmoore

TrueCommand Project Lead
iXsystems
Joined
May 1, 2019
Messages
51
Then you need to work on the wasted space problems and the high number of clicks required to get things done.
The 11.2 GUI takes too much screen real estate with wasteful padding and eye candy.
One of my production servers at work has 124 data drives in the pool. Do a comparison between looking at that in the new UI vs the old UI.
Usability needs to be the focus.

Then please make sure you open a bug ticket or feature request about that exact thing for the FreeNAS UI.
TrueCommand is a completely separate product with it's own pool/disks viewing system. Please see if that provides an easier way to see the status of your storage pool(s) with hundreds of drives. If so, that might be a good recommendation to implement the same type of thing in the FreeNAS UI.
 
Top