The Difference Between TrueNAS Scale and TrueNAS Core

tom here from orange systems and in february of 2022 truenass scale was released by ag systems and since it's released there's been of course a little bit of confusion i've seen people tagging me and twitter and asking questions in forums and my youtube channel here comments and their questions are valid which one should i go with there's a little bit of misinformation out there because apparently a lot of people asked if true and scale was the paid version of true nascor i don't know where that information came from it's like google and couldn't find it but nonetheless both are open source both are free and what i wanted to break down in this video is now that shoena scale is released and here in march of 2022 we also have trunas core 13. it's in beta right now but i'm excited about that because there are now two platforms by ix systems that have a lot of similarities a few differences and they're both being actively developed and it adds to the confusion of which one should you choose well that's what i want to help decipher in this video is give you the information and the differences and similarities between them so you can make an educated choice of which system works for you or in my case both because i have a servers with both on there so i can do all the testing and everything in my lab so that's my recommendation is to use both but that's not always reasonable i get it you want to pick one and load it on your server before we dive into all those details if you'd like to learn more about me and my company head over to lawrences.com if you'd like to hire for consulting such as storage consulting on true nas servers there's a hires button right at the top if you want to support this channel other ways there's affiliate links down below to get your deals and discounts on products and services we talk about on this channel as with many projects the first great place to start is in the documentation you know a little rtfm here and they've got it all laid out here what the differences are we have the trueness core truenas scale in the middle here we have chernas enterprise now this is because they do offer support contracts if you would like to purchase a upgraded level of support this is something that is really important in the enterprise and this is well used in the enterprise by the way we've deployed this and everything from medical to industrial to even some automotive companies have chose to use true and ask for their storage and any large enterprise company frequently wants the support packages to be available to them and this is something they can do it's the same software now there is a slight nuanced difference if you get the ix systems and their high availability systems with trueness core i've reviewed these on my channel before the hardware itself has a special version of trueness core to provide real-time failover this is integration of hardware and software together so yes it's a slightly specialized version because it has the same functionality as your normal trunas system with these add-ons to do the interaction with the hardware for ha failover i'll leave a link to that video if you're interested in where i actually remove a live running motherboard because yes it can survive a motherboard failure and still remain up all right now before we get off topic let's start talking about the differences between core and scale now as i said they are both projects maintained by ag systems they're both open source and free they both use zfs now zfs is an amazing file system i've made jokes and of course have a shirt on my store now that says i'm part of the cult of zfs because yes i'm a fanboy but it's a well-vetted well-developed file system and it is still the underlying file system whether you go with true nas core or true nas scale they didn't change any of that you can also use one of the wonderful features of zfs zfs replication which allows you to essentially back up to another zfs pool that can be on another server and the interoperability is both ways you can even use the same wizard in either one of them to have a true nas scale system copy over to core or vice versa so the inoperability is still there they both support smb nfs s3 and iscsi that's all the same features that you expect out of a normal nas so from a functionality of nas they're pretty much the same there but this is where there's some similarities but differences and it comes down to we'll start with containerization they both offer containerization but trueness core is bsd based like the operating system itself is based on freebsd and they use io cage for jails and beehive for virtualization sure nascale is based on debian so you have a combination of kubernetes docker and kvm for vms so the containerization virtualization platforms with them are very divergent this means if you're doing a migration which is probably the most accurate term as opposed to an upgrade from true nas core to truenascale because you go i would rather use that kubernetes environment the docker and kvm this is more in line with what i want great with the exception of there's not a way to redo your io cage-built jails in true nascor and build them over you have to rebuild them now if you're doing things and you're doing containerization i should say in exactly the right way your data is important but the container itself is essentially ephemeral and meaningless you can just rebuild it on the fly and reattach your data to it this is good implementation of containers where all my data is here the container needs an update or i need to replace it or something went wrong with container you just rebuild the container and reattach it to your data store that concept works both ways but the container itself of course is different between these platforms and there's no way to just translate a container because one's built with freebsd and one's built with docker with debian so yeah there's a big difference between the two of them there now the next thing that truenet scale is really focusing on is the fact that they have clustering and they have that right here under page that says deploy is a single node or a cluster and as it says right here open zfs and gluster combine to enable scale out zfs capabilities with excellent data management deploy a single hyper-converged node any home office or cluster of nodes together for a high scalable and high availability software-defined infrastructure now glusterfest is one of the reasons a lot of people are excited about scale in addition to the docker and kubernetes things clusterfx architecture aggregates compute storage and io resources into a single global namespace what this means is you're defining the storage in trueness scale you're still loading zfs and using truenetscale to configure it and then you'll configure cluster and then that gluster will have a node and each node is an individual computer so individual server if you will that's running scale so gluster is adding a layer of complexity but for the benefit of being able to have more than one scale server so if you say i want to have three scale servers four scale servers you'll take whatever you're targeting at cluster whether that's smb or you're using it as a storage target for your virtualization and you wanna add more nodes you simply add them without redefining cluster or how it's seen by the different targets that you have attached to it this makes it a really interesting and as the name implies scale out system so you can build resiliency with cluster you can add more storage there's different ways to configure it on the back end you can almost think of each scale server depending on how you define them within gluster if you want to define them for more storage or greater performance depending on how you set them up you can almost look on individual drives even though they're their own system this is popular for some of the really large architected systems it's not as much targeted not that you can't use it at home but it's less ideal because you're adding a layer complexity for home users but it's still really cool now this system is still very new i will probably do some video about it in the future but right now it's a very new not completely finished product in there and it's also going to be controlled by the true nas true command system this is where you're actually going to manage not only your trueness core systems trueness enterprise systems or tuna scale systems they also plan to build the gluster management within here so you're gonna be managing gluster not exactly from a web interfacing scale as i understand it now that's why i said if you're looking for a gluster you can find it from the command line in scale but not in a web interface because well there's still roadmap that has not gotten there yet so that's roadmap where they're going but not where they're at right now with scale so if you are looking at deploying gluster great go ahead and start testing with it but you're not going to find a menu that just automatically sets up cluster as of right now now when it comes to look and feel true now scale and trueness core actually look very similar so either dashboard has a very similar layout there's actually one thing i really wish they had and you have the ability to configure which widgets show up on the dashboard here in scale and i'm hoping that becomes a feature that you get in true nas core here but you have your similar services are here and laid out with the little sliders and if we're over here we're going to go to system and we're going to go services and they're laid out in a very similar way now that i've covered the similarities and differences let's talk about which one's right for you now we'll start with performance because i think performance matters and i know some people are going that performance is everything tom and it's not exactly everything it kind of comes down to your use case i have found with my testing so far in march chunas course seems faster than shoena scale when it comes to iscsi and samba performance if those things matter you're already at the limits and you would love more speed i don't feel that's moving over migrating to china scale is going to give you more speed matter of fact based on forum posts and write-ups i've seen in some of the posting and testing i've done true nas scale is just not quite there yet in performance on the same hardware now i still have a few more systems to do some more testing to see if it was an incompatibility with just the systems i tested with but you can see that when i take a system and load it from core to scale and i see a performance drop that's a concern especially if it's an environment where performance i really need like i absolutely need the most performance i can get out of the hardware i have that being said if that's not an issue for you now the big considering factor next is the containers if you really would love to have all these different docker containers available to run directly and natively on the storage server because of the use cases you have and the things you're looking for just may not be available in a bsd jail then scale is kind of a easy yes for you this is what you should be using you're going tom i have this list of containers i love to run it all directly on my storage server then hands down scale is the one for you especially because for some people the only thing they're doing is running a series of containers and using the storage and maybe they transfer some files over samba and losing a few points of performance is not going to be the end of the world when you're transferring files then once again scale is probably a great solution for you now neither of these in my opinion and i get asked this a lot are replacements for full virtualization platforms whether that's esxi xcpng hyper-v or proxmox if you're using those tools and going can i replace those with scale or core because they both offer virtualization they do not offer as many features within their virtualization platform as you're going to find any dedicated product for that for me like i run xcpng as my virtualization platform of choice and i use chernas as a storage target hence the reason i'm usually looking at performance over anything else i'm not using containerization especially when we deploy these commercially that's just less of our use case that's why we go with core for those but that being said the point is i don't think it's a drop in replacement but if you only have one vm and you're not worried about all the extra features because you just don't use them then yeah you can run a virtual machine in there and one thing to nasscale has really upped is the availability of pass-through options and making it a lot easier to pull down and be able to pass through a video card for example which is a popular use case so scales come a long way and core is a lot more difficult to do that on so that's worth looking at if you have some simple virtualization needs but overall hopefully i've answered the question of the differences the similarities and give you some insight so you can understand which is the right for you it's not like there's an easy answer and for me as i said in the beginning i have servers running scale i have servers running core some of it is for testing some of it's because i like some of the docker stuff that goes on in there and i want to you know be testing these on the cutting edge and we happen to have a lot of servers in my lab so hey we loaded some with each one so you know more fun to play with i'll leave links to things i talked about in the description below plus my tutorials i have on core and of course since scales release i am working on new tutorials just because there's a few nuanced differences in the way some things are handled so i'll be working on plenty of stuff for that leave your thoughts in the comments below or head over the forums for a more in-depth discussion thanks and thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video if you've enjoyed the content please give us a thumbs up if you would like to see more content from this channel hit the subscribe button and the bell icon if you'd like to hire a short project head over to lawrences.com and click the hires button right at the top to help this channel out in other ways there's a join button here for youtube and a patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated for deals discounts and offers check out our affiliate links in the description of all of our videos including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and designs come out well randomly so check back frequently and finally our forums forums.laurensystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics covered on this channel thanks again for watching and look forward to hearing from you you

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 139,861

Keywords: LawrenceSystems, truenas scale, network attached storage, truenas scale docker, truenas scale release, truenas scale 21.06, truenas scale vs core, network attached storage 2021, truenas scale roadmap, true nas, truenas core 12, truenas 12, network attached storage for home, truenas scale 21.08, how to migrate from truenas core to truenas scale

Id: Vp5D6z_aSrw

Length: 13min 36sec (816 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 07 2022