TrueNAS Scale Free vs Enterprise

[NickF]

We're reluctant to support FC as SW-only without having an extensive FC lab with all HBAs and switches and clients. We would prefer that most users use iSCSI.

We can provide FC via a nominal fee...it includes the physical appliance.

Why are you using FC? Is it about performance or legacy integration?

Home lab or business?

I'm just wondering for my homelab not for business applications. I use FC for my DCs at work and would like to build a lab at home to play with TN/VMWare in a non production environment. I know I can make it work with some older version of CORE in the past, but paying a nominal fee to have it in the GUI would be nice. Other than enclosure management, it's one of the only differentiating features right now in enterprise that i would be interested in, and theoretically shouldn't be difficult to enable on your end as long as there is an infinite caveat exemptor saying not to use in prod.

 

[serving_myself]

I could say that I'd be interesting in having KMIP support as a sort of "premium" feature in Scale (for a nominal fee as was mentioned before).
It's just in a home env with a single all-in-one box, but I believe it'd help quite a bit encryption-wise.

I think leaking such selected features into the free tier (with limiting the potential scale you can go with each of them) would be very interesting idea.

 

[morganL]

We would like to make available one-off "enterprise" licenses for free to active testers and developers... quid pro quo would be write-ups, bug reports or code. Its a personal goal of mine to get this going for 2023.

 

[NickF]

We would like to make available one-off "enterprise" licenses for free to active testers and developers... quid pro quo would be write-ups, bug reports or code. Its a personal goal of mine to get this going for 2023.

I’d love to :)

 

[serving_myself]

Keep me in mind for the KMIP then :)

 

[Skrenes]

This thread was mentioned in https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/encryption-and-truenas-scale.107206/
The TL;DR is that the /data folder contains sensitive information, which ought to exist in the System Dataset, which ought to be encrypted with a password prompt, which could then be used with KMIP.

 

[sretalla]

The TL;DR is that the /data folder contains sensitive information, which ought to exist in the System Dataset, which ought to be encrypted with a password prompt, which could then be used with KMIP.

I think you haven't yet understood what the KIMP implementation does in Enterprise...

Keys are stored at the KIMP server, so never present on the TrueNAS box, requested at boot from KIMP (which won't be present outside the company network).

The /data directory is irrelevant in that scenario as it doesn't contain encryption keys.

 

[Skrenes]

The /data directory is irrelevant in that scenario as it doesn't contain encryption keys.

Well that's good for enterprise with KIMP, but isn't this bad for everyone else?

 

[sretalla]

Well that's good for enterprise with KIMP, but isn't this bad for everyone else?

The reason I pointed you here was the conversation going on above with @morganL

We would like to make available one-off "enterprise" licenses for free to active testers and developers... quid pro quo would be write-ups, bug reports or code. Its a personal goal of mine to get this going for 2023.

It seems there's a change in the way enterprise features may be proposed in SCALE whereby individual features would be offered outside of the normal Enterprise (iX hardware only) model...

There seems to be an opportunity if you're prepared to give feedback and do testing to have an "early version" of that (maybe without charge).

Specifically in reference to the KIMP feature in this case.

 

[jhartbarger]

We would like to make available one-off "enterprise" licenses for free to active testers and developers... quid pro quo would be write-ups, bug reports or code. Its a personal goal of mine to get this going for 2023.

Is this offer still valid? I am building a new system and have some Optane PMEM dimms I was going to use along with my NVME drives and looking through the docs it appears PMEM is only available with enterprise?

 

[morganL]

Is this offer still valid? I am building a new system and have some Optane PMEM dimms I was going to use along with my NVME drives and looking through the docs it appears PMEM is only available with enterprise?

Optane OMEM works with SCALE or Core
NVDIMMs used in an HA config are in Enterprise.

 

[aviegas]

One the topic of Free x Enterprise, I just "moved" from Core to Scale and noticed that support for ALUA is gone and most of the references to it in the documentation vanished... The only reference I could find is that it's an Enterprise feature now. Is that true? Any rationale for this change?

 

[jgreco]

One the topic of Free x Enterprise, I just "moved" from Core to Scale and noticed that support for ALUA is gone and most of the references to it in the documentation vanished... The only reference I could find is that it's an Enterprise feature now. Is that true? Any rationale for this change?

Multipath support was dropped in CORE as of FreeBSD 13 and it has never been available in SCALE. I suspect this is related. It is also, if I understand correctly, being deprecated in Enterprise.

 

[morganL]

One the topic of Free x Enterprise, I just "moved" from Core to Scale and noticed that support for ALUA is gone and most of the references to it in the documentation vanished... The only reference I could find is that it's an Enterprise feature now. Is that true? Any rationale for this change?

ALUA is not in SCALE Bluefin .. planned for support in SCALE Cobia.

I've only seen it used for HA systems.... have you used it without HA?

 

[aviegas]

Indeed it's something more on the realm of HA, but in theory (at least its my understanding) one can use it to select the "best" path between asymmetric multihomed hosts (if the storage listen on multiple interfaces). It always worked for me on CORE to allow VMware to initially pick the best path (if it was really at work or not, I can't really say).

Not really an issue for me, as I can manually force the path selection, but I was just intrigued that VMware was reporting a different type of array. I thought there was a problem in migrating to Scale. Good to know it's planned to come back in Cobia.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Re: ALUA, it's an edge-case issue affecting VMware where previous SATP claim rules exist.

If you've set up SATP claim rules in VMware for HA systems to enable ALUA, then it catches CORE, Enterprise, and SCALE because they all identify LUNs with the same string of TrueNAS iSCSI Disk.

Both CORE and Enterprise support ALUA so the claimrule routing them to NMP plugin VMW_SATP_ALUA is fine, but SCALE presents an issue for the moment because it will return an error to ALUA queries (until it's supported, which is hopefully soon) - it needs to run under VMW_SATP_DEFAULT_AA or _AP to use the default non-ALUA plugin.

SATP "VMW_SATP_ALUA" could not add path "vmhba64:C0:T0:L0" for device "Unregistered Device". Error Not supported

 

[NilsS]

Multipath support was dropped in CORE as of FreeBSD 13 and it has never been available in SCALE. I suspect this is related. It is also, if I understand correctly, being deprecated in Enterprise.

Wait, why is multipath being dropped from everything? I would think at the very least they'd keep it in the enterprise releases, or do I misunderstand and multipath is not required to utilize the redundancy of SAS?

 

[jgreco]

Wait, why is multipath being dropped from everything?

Because after more than ten years, they've determined that it is more trouble than it is worth.

I would think at the very least they'd keep it in the enterprise releases

Apparently it has caused more problems than it has solved over the years, and since the solution was relatively finicky and FreeBSD-specific, it was decided to drop support for it. It's a tragic loss of featurism that almost no one here in the forums used, and apparently the PITA aspect has motivated them to not want to support it anymore in Enterprise either.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Quoting from another thread where this was discussed, the short answer is "safety."

Yes, FreeNAS supported multipath.

However, it was removed from both TrueNAS CORE 13.0 and SCALE for safety reasons. We've had several users lose whole pools by miscabling systems and making administrative mistakes. It was about the only thing that caused catastrophic data loss.

TrueNAS CORE 13 still import multipath pools but discouraged users from creating new pools that way. TrueNAS SCALE does not import or create multipath pools.

We converted iX products from using multipath to not.. We've not seen any decrease in reliablity, but definitely have reduced the number of tricky support situations.

It was good technology, but complex and high risk. Risk-reward was poor.

 

[Arwen]

Kind of sad.

Fibre Channel multi-pathing worked very well. Even with longer distances, (where server was in one building and the disk array in another). But, FC was designed to allow switches between servers and disk arrays, which could then be isolated from another switch for the other path.

Of course, it was always a PITA to trouble shoot FC pathing problems. But, in general, lower risk of data corruption.