Who is using Scale in a productive environment?

[derWalter]

Greetings to everyone,

the background to my question is, that I am about to setup my first TrueNas system and I directly want to start with Scale.
The system is used as a home NAS in conjunction with Nextcloud for syncing.
Backup via rsync and an external HD.

I would like to build and setup and from there on, just hit the update button from time to time.
Is this realistic? If 2021.04 is coming beginning of April, I ll wait for that release, if its coming late
in April, I would have to start with 2021.02.

As I read from from time to time, that people are already using scale in a productive environment.

So my question is:

who is using Scale in a productive environment,
what is the use case and what is your experience at the moment.

How brittle/stable is the system at the moment, regarding data security?
I dont really mind the system breaking (which should be solvable by rollback or reinstall), but I mind data breaking!


Again, greetings to everyone
and thanks a lot for reading and contributing.

 

[sretalla]

How brittle/stable is the system at the moment, regarding data security?

It's a deployment of OpenZFS 2.0, so should be close to as stable as for TrueNAS CORE in terms of ZFS reliability.

It runs on Debian Bullseye and a non-stable kernel though, so be prepared for the potential for that to cause issues that ZFS can't predict/prevent.

 

[stavros-k]

Start with CORE, do your pools, Spin up a linux VM and use docker for nextcloud,
When SCALE is BETA,or close to release, it will be a migrate guide.
Any by using docker for nextcloud will hopefully make it easier to transfer your db to scale apps.

 

[ornias]

I would like to build and setup and from there on, just hit the update button from time to time.
Is this realistic? If 2021.04 is coming beginning of April, I ll wait for that release, if its coming late
in April, I would have to start with 2021.02.

I personally expect 21.04 around, but not before, mid april.
(2 weeks are not enough to crush some of the nasty bugs out)

As I read from from time to time, that people are already using scale in a productive environment.


So my question is:

who is using Scale in a productive environment,
what is the use case and what is your experience at the moment.

Mostly Home-Production, but yes I do.
Funnily enough, considering i'm one of the prime SCALE k8s App creators currently, I do not use Apps or k8s on SCALE in production and expect I need to trash the system when I move over.

How brittle/stable is the system at the moment, regarding data security?
I dont really mind the system breaking (which should be solvable by rollback or reinstall), but I mind data breaking!

It's an ALPHA expect dataloss, period.

It runs on Debian Bullseye and a non-stable kernel though, so be prepared for the potential for that to cause issues that ZFS can't predict/prevent.

It runs 5.10.8 Stable with a few minor augments (that are not really relevant to kernel performance/bugs) https://github.com/truenas/linux/commits/SCALE-v5.10-stable

 

[derWalter]

Mostly Home-Production, but yes I do.
Funnily enough, considering i'm one of the prime SCALE k8s App creators currently, I do not use Apps or k8s on SCALE in production and expect I need to trash the system when I move over.

Funny, why is that? Why aren't you using any of them yourself?

Why do you think you have to trash your system? And trashing in what scope? Complete wipe of everything, or just reinstalling the OS?

It's an ALPHA expect dataloss, period.

Did you, or someone else experience data loss, because of the imaturity of Scale? I'm asking because I didn't find such reports. (which doesn't mean that I couldn't be the first to report it :D)

 

[ornias]

Funny, why is that? Why aren't you using any of them yourself?

Because it's either using K8S completely OR docker-compose, either-or... Because docker-compose needs iptables enabled and afaik k8s does not.
Even if it would work, I can't be 100% sure it would be solid which my users expect.

Why do you think you have to trash your system? And trashing in what scope? Complete wipe of everything, or just reinstalling the OS?

Currently using docker compose (and using some hacks before to get things running) and updating from the first ALPHA to RELEASE is never a good way to ensure a stable system.

Did you, or someone else experience data loss, because of the imaturity of Scale? I'm asking because I didn't find such reports. (which doesn't mean that I couldn't be the first to report it :D)

Myself? No.
Mostly because I know what I'm doing, what not-to-use-yet and i don't touch the machine.

However: Working on semi-working Apps I know of quite a few scenario's where careless users would've lost data. ;-)

 

[derWalter]

thank you ornias.

As I've to wait for hardware to arrive (with all the unusual delivery hickups...) I also got some time to think about the way I wanna go.

Either I follow your recommendation setup Core and switch to Scale once a stable version is released (having to do the setup process at least twice),
or go the wanky way, start with Scale and tingle along the way (maybe install and just keep updating *fingers crossed* and in worst case having to deal with backups and more than one setup of everything).

Usually I lean toward the unconventional, not paved path, exploring the limits and finding out whats possible :)