TrueNas Core to Scale portability

[Salty1]

Hi all, I am glad to join the community.

I was wondering if I can move my existing pools from beta 2.1 of Core to the latest nightly of Scale based on compatibility. I see more of a future for Scale on my NAS than the existing FreeBSD backend.

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[sretalla]

zpool export poolname on the Core (GUI export will work too), move the disks over, then zpool import on the SCALE box will tell you if there's any issue... theory says your chances are the best they have ever been since both now use the respective OS version of OpenZFS 2.0.

 

[anodos]

zpool export poolname on the Core (GUI export will work too), move the disks over, then zpool import on the SCALE box will tell you if there's any issue... theory says your chances are the best they have ever been since both now use the respective OS version of OpenZFS 2.0.

Two _major_ compatibility issues between OpenZFS on Linux and FreeBSD:
1) ZoL writes xattrs in with names incompatible with other openzfs implementations. This means files written over SMB will lose metadata on pool import into scale.
2) ZoL in scale does not currently support NFSv4 ACLs. So permissions will be lost on migration.

 

[morganL]

As a general philosophy, the focus on TrueNAS SCALE is to get to RELEASE quality 1st while maintaining ZFS compatibility. After that, there will be more focus and testing of importing pools from CORE to SCALE. At this stage, we recommend TrueNAS SCALE instance use a new pool. Replication between CORE and SCALE should work.

 

[sretalla]

Two _major_ compatibility issues between OpenZFS on Linux and FreeBSD:
1) ZoL writes xattrs in with names incompatible with other openzfs implementations. This means files written over SMB will lose metadata on pool import into scale.
2) ZoL in scale does not currently support NFSv4 ACLs. So permissions will be lost on migration.

Great points, but those aren't blockers if somebody just wants to swap, doesn't care about metadata and can re-do the permissions on the other side.

As a general philosophy, the focus on TrueNAS SCALE is to get to RELEASE quality 1st while maintaining ZFS compatibility. After that, there will be more focus and testing of importing pools from CORE to SCALE. At this stage, we recommend TrueNAS SCALE instance use a new pool. Replication between CORE and SCALE should work.

Also great to know, but the OP was asking about moving disks from one to another, so replication presumably isn't an option.

 

[mjt5282]

I tried the nightly Truenas-SCALE yesterday on my backup server, and it wouldn't mount my pools read/write because it was missing support for : zfs feature com.delphix:log_spacemap . zpool --version implied it was running 0.8.3 instead of the pre-release of openzfs 2.0 (which presumably would be able to cope with delphix:log_spacemap). Can someone running SCALE double check what zpool --version returns with?

 

[sretalla]

Can someone running SCALE double check what zpool --version returns with?

Code:

truenas1# zpool --version
zfs-0.8.3-2
zfs-kmod-0.8.3-2

 

[morganL]

I tried the nightly Truenas-SCALE yesterday on my backup server, and it wouldn't mount my pools read/write because it was missing support for : zfs feature com.delphix:log_spacemap . zpool --version implied it was running 0.8.3 instead of the pre-release of openzfs 2.0 (which presumably would be able to cope with delphix:log_spacemap). Can someone running SCALE double check what zpool --version returns with?

OpenZFS 2.0 will be integrated soon and prior to the 20.10 version.... it was waiting for TrueNAS 12.0 to complete its BETA process.

 

[mjt5282]

i re-installed Truenas-SCALE and updated to this morning's nightly build, and the 2 pools imported without a problem!

 

[morganL]

i re-installed Truenas-SCALE and updated to this morning's nightly build, and the 2 pools imported without a problem!

Yes openZFS 2.0 add on 9/21.... https://www.truenas.com/docs/hub/scale/dev-notes/

 

[darkcloud784]

Has there been any other news about plans for going from CORE to Scale? Right now I'm running CORE and would love to switch so I can take advantage of KVM.

 

[morganL]

Has there been any other news about plans for going from CORE to Scale? Right now I'm running CORE and would love to switch so I can take advantage of KVM.

Right now, its a manual process which we don't recommend unless you are very familiar with TrueNAS. If you can afford the time and risk, you can boot your system with SCALE and then reimport the pool and download your old configuration... In Q1, we plan to provide a safe automated approach. Do you have a backup of your data?

 

[darkcloud784]

Right now, its a manual process which we don't recommend unless you are very familiar with TrueNAS. If you can afford the time and risk, you can boot your system with SCALE and then reimport the pool and download your old configuration... In Q1, we plan to provide a safe automated approach. Do you have a backup of your data?

Unfortunately I do not have a full backup of all the data, but I do have a partial backup and full backup of the configuration.

 

[morganL]

Unfortunately I do not have a full backup of all the data, but I do have a partial backup and full backup of the configuration.

I can't recommend you try it if there is data at risk..... it would be unprofessional. I recommend waiting for other people to try and document the process.

 

[atxbyea]

Is there any update to this @morganL ?

I'm quite looking forward to Scale, and since my docker host is filling slowly up I would like to migrate in the near future to my Truenas box that has.. quite a bit more of resources.
Guessing this will be part of the BETA phase of TrueNAS scale ? I have been running FreeNAS since 11.1 and been on every BETA train since, and I have had absolutely _no_ issues that were more than cosmetical, so I have no fears of jumping on the BETA train of TrueNAS Scale either, IXSystems quality is top notch in that regard.

 

[morganL]

Is there any update to this @morganL ?

I'm quite looking forward to Scale, and since my docker host is filling slowly up I would like to migrate in the near future to my Truenas box that has.. quite a bit more of resources.
Guessing this will be part of the BETA phase of TrueNAS scale ? I have been running FreeNAS since 11.1 and been on every BETA train since, and I have had absolutely _no_ issues that were more than cosmetical, so I have no fears of jumping on the BETA train of TrueNAS Scale either, IXSystems quality is top notch in that regard.

We appreciate the vote of confidence, but we would hate to lose your data. If you have a backup of your data, then you could go through the process manually, but you should first document all the services you need the SCALE system to inherit and provide. At this stage the process is pre-alpha and not BETA... I expect it to be alpha in January and the BETA in February (but there a lot of testing to be completed).

 

[atxbyea]

We appreciate the vote of confidence, but we would hate to lose your data. If you have a backup of your data, then you could go through the process manually, but you should first document all the services you need the SCALE system to inherit and provide. At this stage the process is pre-alpha and not BETA... I expect it to be alpha in January and the BETA in February (but there a lot of testing to be completed).

Thanks for the fast feedback, I was hoping for a BETA in January, but I guess I will brace myself until Febuary then.
I would prefer to have a documented process in place before doing it, but based on previous experiences I would not mind being a test rabbit at this point.

I will be deploying a Core VM shortly with some emulated storage and try to migrate that to Scale and see what the current state of the process looks like.

 

[atxbyea]

Short report back, just creating a vm with Core, creating 2x RAIDz pools with 4 drives each creating some random data on the pools, then reinstalling the host with Scale and importing the pools is flawless it seems.

Appears to be an issue with restoring the config backed up from the Core version to the Scale version, so I might have to open an issue for that :
Error: [EFAULT] Failed to upload config, version newer than the current installed.

 

[sretalla]

Appears to be an issue with restoring the config backed up from the Core version to the Scale version, so I might have to open an issue for that

Have you read the release notes and the advice from others in this thread that the migration you're attempting won't be included in the product until February?

Of course you can't restore config from one to the other... tunables are different, jails don't exist, the frontend version is different and different settings exist.

The iX team have agreed that this is something that is useful and it's planned to be a feature in future, but you can't call it an issue right now.

 

[morganL]

Short report back, just creating a vm with Core, creating 2x RAIDz pools with 4 drives each creating some random data on the pools, then reinstalling the host with Scale and importing the pools is flawless it seems.

Appears to be an issue with restoring the config backed up from the Core version to the Scale version, so I might have to open an issue for that :
Error: [EFAULT] Failed to upload config, version newer than the current installed.

Right now, you would have to manually setup the sharing with the datasets you have imported... the configuration import is the major piece to be completed and tested.