Other FreeBSD options for FreeBSD fans? (Discussion)

[victort]

TrueNAS CORE may have reached the point where users that have grown to love FreeBSD will have to either migrate to SCALE, or find alternative option. Granted, it is a possibility that CORE will stay for 14, 15 and beyond, but bear with me. And I will also add that it will probably be supported until IX has sufficient reason to EOL it. This will hopefully not happen, but if it does it seems we still have 2+ years of support for the 13 series. Anyways, I don't want this thread to be a discussion about that. I want to gain insight into what users are pursuing, and what works well.

Here are some options I have found.

1. OmniOS + napp-it (sadly napp-it isn't supported on stock FreeBSD)
2. XigmaNAS (FreeBSD based, with less options and no real jail management software)
3. Vanilla FreeBSD + Webmin + zfsmanager (excellent UI but the module seems to be broken or something)
4. Vanilla FreeBSD (requires manual zfs/pool management from cli)
5. ClonOS (looks very promising, includes CBSD jail management + VM management, but lacks a whole lot when it comes to disk management)

I am leaning towards 4 as it allows the simplest way to manage jails. 3 Would work as well, as it includes SMART disk status and some other handy tools that are easily managed with the WEBUI.

Thoughts are welcome.

My goal is to aquire some alternaitve in a single thread for others to be able to choose from.

 

[Jailer]

If you would like to stay with FreeBSD I would suggest you read up on jail managers and play with them a bit to see what you like. There are plenty of options out there and you may find one that will do what you like. You will of course have to roll your own with everything and you won't have a nice fancy GUI to manage it like we currently do with TrueNAS.

I haven't messed with it in a while to see how development has gone but CBSD might be an option for you. It's available as a package in the repo.

 

[winnielinnie]

I'll be frank. There is no other FreeBSD option out there which "GUI-tizes" everything needed for a NAS like TrueNAS Core offers.

* I'm not even referring to their GUI management of jails. I'm talking about SMB, NFS, Rsync, snapshots, pool actions, dataset management, replications, and on and on and on.

** XigmaNAS feels like a cheap second-class knockoff that doesn't even center around ZFS. At least TrueNAS Core is built around leveraging ZFS's strengths.

 

[Whattteva]

Well, I'm already running a vanilla FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE with a dozen jails for all my services so... I guess I'll just make a couple more to run NFS and SMB lol. BastilleBSD makes it all a breeze.

Really, the primary reason for me using TrueNAS is the immutability/recoverable config file. It makes disaster recovery very trivial, but I don't mind having to do things manually once in a while if CORE goes away.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Quick note: the "Future of TrueNAS CORE" thread drew some attention by the FreeBSD Foundation

 

[Kris Moore]

Haven't seen it yet, but not really surprising. That is their mission statement after all, which is to advocate on behalf of FreeBSD no matter what. It's like being surprised that the press secretary would defend a presidents positions. Isn't that #1 in their job description?

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Haven't seen it yet, but not really surprising. That is their mission statement after all, which is to advocate on behalf of FreeBSD no matter what. It's like being surprised that the press secretary would defend a presidents positions. Isn't that #1 in their job description?

They just asked for a call so far. Nothing on the forum yet.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Quick note: the "Future of TrueNAS CORE" thread drew some attention by the FreeBSD Foundation

So let's say people are talking and people are watching this space. They regard it as critically important to have a solid FreeBSD based storage appliance in the market.

Nothing concrete just yet. Naturally.

 

[Kris Moore]

So let's say people are talking and people are watching this space. They regard it as critically important to have a solid FreeBSD based storage appliance in the market.

Nothing concrete just yet. Naturally.

After losing most (if not all) the other major commercial storage vendors to Linux that totally makes sense. I'd argue that time and effort would be best spent into making FreeBSD evolve faster into a viable platform for future appliances in general (not just storage). Then you don't have to entice anybody, they just come back naturally. Rewards just need to vastly outweigh the risks, basic stuff. Businesses always go where the advantages are (if they want to stay in business that is).

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Understood. But have you been watching Michaels presentation on the FreeBSD appliance?

 

[Kris Moore]

Understood. But have you been watching Michaels presentation on the FreeBSD appliance?

Yep! I like Michael, hung out with him quite a bit. He's a great FreeBSD cheerleader, one of the best frankly. He fights the good fight. But as much as I respect him, talks are good and all, but we have to look at reality as well. I would disagree with some of the assertions and conclusions about FreeBSD's suitability as a "mainstream" appliance building OS. Of course there are always exceptions to that, if you have a very simple stack, or have commercial reasons that you need BSD license (so you can close-source things), etc. But I think the stark reality is that (like it or not) the world has moved on, and FreeBSD hasn't kept pace in enough areas that count. Again, businesses have done the math. Do I pour a lot of effort into BSD to get things I would have got for free elsewhere? Or do I spend that limited time and resource into efforts that drive an actual product forward. I'd argue that I don't really need to prove that, one only needs to look at the reality of the situation today with vendors and consumers.

Again, not trying to explicitly bash BSD in that sense, just stating the reality of the market and ecosystem today. Its a great OS for some things. Cleaner in many ways. I still like it for many reasons, including my roots. But I'd argue that up against the mammoth that is Linux (and is also fully Open Source, lest we forget), its hard to find reasons to pick it today. Apart from emotional attachment, needing licenses that mix with closed licensing, or a very very specific use-case. In which case, more power to those folks and carry on :)

 

[Whattteva]

After losing most (if not all) the other major commercial storage vendors to Linux that totally makes sense. I'd argue that time and effort would be best spent into making FreeBSD evolve faster into a viable platform for future appliances in general (not just storage). Then you don't have to entice anybody, they just come back naturally. Rewards just need to vastly outweigh the risks, basic stuff. Businesses always go where the advantages are (if they want to stay in business that is).

I rather disagree with this. Businesses vastly favor FreeBSD over Linux due to its more liberal license. It just works out differently. Take, for example, a lot of router OS's, Apple's iOS/MacOS, PlayStation. One would argue BSD code in some way, shape, or form is way more ubiquitous. None of the aforementioned products chose Linux because they would've been forced to also release their source code.

Of course, the problem is, many of these businesses don't really contribute back to the original project.

 

[Kris Moore]

And you just proved my point. Some of the examples you gave are the worst corporate offenders who only prefer BSD so they can commercialize and not give back... Not optimal for the health of the project long term though..

 

[Whattteva]

And you just proved my point. Some of the examples you gave are the worst corporate offenders who only prefer BSD so they can commercialize and not give back... Not optimal for the health of the project long term though..

Do'h, you're 100% right on that. I do respect ixSystems as one of the few good actors that do contribute plenty back!