20101118

FreeNAS 8 Beta released

iXsystems is pleased to announced FreeNAS 8.0 Beta. FreeNAS 8.0 has undergone a complete rewrite. We've redesigned the GUI to be easier to use and extend. We've upgraded many technologies in the system for improved hardware support, faster I/O, better modularity, and easier upgrades. We trust that you'll find the system easier to use and, in time, much more feature rich than the current FreeNAS offering.

The base system has migrated from FreeBSD 7.x and the m0m0wall build system to FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE and NanoBSD. The system startup has migrated from the older php scripts to the standard FreeBSD rc.d boot system. We've pushed many of the bug fixes and system improvements back into FreeBSD.

We've rewritten the GUI using Python and Django. We've completely removed the old php system. In addition to Django, we're using Dojango and Dojo to implement AJAX features. The new system is much more modular than the old system. We will use this modularity in a future version for easy integration of custom features into your FreeNAS box.

The installer has been rewritten using pc-sysinstall, the future FreeBSD installation technology. The scripts have a similar feel to the old PHP scripts for users of the current system. The ISO now is only an installer. You can no longer run in live mode from a CDROM.

The installation types have changed; there's no longer an embedded or full install, nor can the image be installed on a data disk. You must now install FreeNAS onto a dedicated device. FreeNAS supports USB flash, CompactFlash, hard drives, ssd or any other mass storage device supported by FreeBSD.

FreeNAS 8.0 features ZFS version 14.

FreeNAS 8.0 beta has retained the core functionality of a storage appliance. The media center features of the box have not been reimplemented in the core FreeNAS package. A media center add-on package will provide this functionality in the future. We've focused on creating a robust, easy-to-use, and extensible system. We're creating the base to allow other types of packages to be added, such as printer support, scanner support, or home automation.

To help prioritize what current features are turned into packages in future FreeNAS releases, please visit http://support.freenas.org/ to provide feedback. Please add feature requests tickets. If a feature you would like to see in FreeNAS already has a ticket please just subscribe to it add a small comment, even if it's a "++." It will help us better judge and meet community needs.

You can download FreeNAS from Source Forge and read all the release notes on our wiki.

62 comments:

Anonymous said...

MoMoWall? :D ;)

MenacingM said...

Rockin... thanks for all the hard work... FreeNAS looks to have a bright future.

xDexter said...

So can we upgrade from .7?

Anonymous said...

Freenas just rocked so much, now it will megagigasuprarock !

danny8 said...

Looks quite nice. I read all your release notes and installed the system. I did not add any shares, though.

When you say "You must now install FreeNAS onto a dedicated device," are you saying shares cannot be placed on the FreeNAS boot disk? I will have to set up my CF card with FreeNAS if so.

(After registering at freenas.org, I received my verification email. It contained no URL or link, so I'm unable to post feedback there.)

Thanks for the hard work! Looking forward to more.

danny8 said...

Sorry, I reread your post and I think you said exactly what I asked.

Will all future versions of FreeNAS require at least a two 'spindle' system? I suppose this is not a problem owing to the low cost of flash storage.

cubix said...

+1

Warner Losh said...

I meant m0n0wall. It was a one bit error in my brain...

We don't have a 0.7 upgrade path right now, but plan to offer it.

NanoBSD tends to force a two-disk solution, but with a few changes, we could make it work on a one-spindle system, but it is more challenging. There is one issue that currently prevents it.

Plouj said...

Great stuff. I'm excited to see that FreeNAS is increasingly embracing ZFS.

As far as a separate OS disk goes. I don't think it's a big problem as long as it works with flash drives (provided little or no constant writing to the disk). As a comparison, NexentaStor requires a separate disk/zfs pool for the OS already. Although, I haven't found concrete information on how to reduce/disable log writing to make it flash friendly. Plus, a storage guru would probably tell you that it's better to keep the OS separate from the data anyways :)

Jamie Graham said...

Absolutely awesome work. I am so pleased to be able to try out the new Freenas. I can't imagine how much work has gone into it to get it to this point. It's beautiful and I can't wait to install it in one of my servers.

darkfader said...

maybe it's just me but I miss the clear, fast old m0n0wall gui. I don't need fancy, but need fast and clean.

while I'm at it, I couldn't even find the iSCSI settings :(

ugur said...

i love freenas.

Anonymous said...

I'd like to add my vote for a single-spindle system option. I've been running FreeNAS on older PCs, and promoting it for that as well. I get great results with FreeNAS on these old units but the ones I'm using (Dell GX270) they don't have an option for booting off USB.

Unknown said...

what happened to iscsi?

Unknown said...

Derek said...
So can we upgrade from .7?


+1

Im also interested of knowing the upgrade senario.

Keep up the good work!

/J

Unknown said...

I agree with the need to focus on a stable core system first. I actually prefer having the boot partition in a separate disk, it makes moving disks around a lot easier. If that's also the easiest/more stable route to go then I'd suggest you guys stick with it.

Unknown said...

I agree with you guys focusing on building a stable core system first. I actually like the idea of having the partition in a separate disk, it makes moving disks around easier. If the software side is more stable/easier go that route then by all means stick with it

Kevin T. said...

No more embedded installations? I'm confused about how the system must be installed now. Can I still install it on my 2GB usb flash drive like I'm doing now? I also have 4 HDs in a RAID 10 for the data. Will this still be supported?

Anonymous said...

i'm assuming as one can in v.7## and previous versions, that v.8## will still allow preformatted drives can be accessed.. understanding that fat32/ntfs/etc is not the native or best formatting for freenas, but to get up and running without formatting over your existing data thereon..

limericky said...

should i assume that v.8+ can be installed in the media, usb, or whatever, as a system/os disk... and then drives can be physically added and mounted as one installs them?

Unknown said...

How's the ZFS IO performance in release 8? I remember ZFSBuild.com benchmarking the performance and it was not pretty. I love FreeNAS specifically because of it's ZFS support. Has this been fixed?

Thanks, Michael

Anonymous said...

Can packages from FreeBSD 8.1 RELEASE ports be installed?

Anonymous said...

I have been waiting for this day to arrive for a while. One question before I attempt this. Will you be able to migrate existing zfs raidz based hard-drives from .7 into a new install running .8?

Unknown said...

Looks very promising Warner. Is there a plan to enable easy expansion of raid or raidz sets? This is the only thing, in my opinion, holding back freenas from being a true competitor for things like Data Robotics Drobo-FS. Keep up the great work.

Anonymous said...

I've been running FreeNAS on systems that were too old to have USB boot. This made the ability to run the system from the install media very useful -- not a deal killer, I still have a floppy drive that can boot and mount the USB, then launch the image on the USB. Any chance that feature will return in a later v8 release??

meggawhat said...

What about Webserver and Bitorrent services?
I use both on the old freenas 7 platform and they are great.

Anonymous said...

Just some feedback. I got a kernel panic booting the install disc. Seemed it didn't like my USB CD-ROM drive.

I installed it on the flash drive using a laptop that had an IDE optical drive.

Lots of screen corruption on the Web GUI using Safari 5 browser. Also I couldn't figure out how to add users and groups.

Also gotta complain about the decision to not partition the flash disk so that the excess space cannot be a mountable FS. Ideally this is where any added packages would be installed. Who would want that stuff on their storage disk?

Kalle said...

If you want it to boot from usb on system that don't natively do that, it is possible. http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html

I think it is premature to call version 8 a beta though, it is missing a lot of functionality, and the web interface seems a bit jumpy to me. And with jumpy I mean, that it seems to do stuff before the dom is completely loaded causing it to go from one state to another in a jump.

Also, the interface has the same buttons, but different graphics on some pages.

I'd call it an alpha, at most.

Looking forward to the end result though!

Kev said...

Ok, I just installed the new beta tonight in a virtual machine to test it out, and I have have to admit that I'm pretty disappointed. This feels like a major step backward to me. The interface seems too "dummied down" for me and really limits what I can do. The storage portion of the setup for zfs (and its options) is especially disappointing. Where are all the options for zfs setup?? Where do you create your data sets? It's generally bad practice to store your data directly in the root of the storage pool, but the new setup doesn't allow otherwise. Can we at least have an "advanced" setup option to configure all the zfs specific settings as we had in 0.7.1 and 0.7.2? I realize this is still in beta, but I was expecting at least the same level of functionality I had with 0.7.1, but I just don't see it. If the user interface was more like previous versions (containing more options) and the zfs setup was more like previous versions, I think the beta would be closer to where it needs to be. I'm really hoping my input is taken into consideration before the final version is released.

Kev said...

Where are the options to connect to an LDAP or Active Directory server for authentication to shares?? That's pretty darn important, I think...especially for small businesses. Please tell me there are plans to incorporate this...

Anonymous said...

At least the web interface is alpha only.
Lots of functionality is missing, indeed the iSCSI part as you can hardly do much more than creating a single target.

/gustav

Орлин said...

I tested it on a physical machine and on a virtual one. Still buggy, and I'd not recommend to use this beta version in production environment - I have to restart it every day. The web interface options are really limited, compared to what we can do with 0.72. And finally, it's still slow on a virtual machine. I'm testing FreeNAS 0.8 x 64 on VMWare ESXI 4.1 x 64. It's 3-5 times slower than a regular OpenSuse Linux 11.3 with Samba.
Hope some performance improvement will let FreeNAS be competitive in virtual environment.

wxop said...

I've created a Ticket suggesting to allow easy install on Flash+HD in order to build the most reliable setup.
Take a look at
http://support.freenas.org/ticket/91
and vote for it or comment if you like it.

Qazwsx said...

I registered at https://support.freenas.org but it wont let me create a ticket, anyways I hope they make a module for Teamspeak and Ventrillo since they have freebsd versions :)

Anonymous said...

Install on the one only harddisk has been removed.
Instead of booting within seconds it now needs minutes and an additional usb. usb 1.1 makes this possible... also writing and reading the system "disk" needs a lot more time.
please invent install os AND sharing files on the same disk... thx

Unknown said...

Ok, this is awesome guys, just installed verion .8 and copying all my data over to my ZFS pool, took me less than 30 minutes to get it all up and running, YOUR AWESOME!!!! I'm in love with FreeNAS (so wierd to be in love with something like this, but, it, seems...so natural...?)...

Thomas said...

ZFS is great but it reacts rather poorly to power failures, which is one of the reasons having an UPS is a good thing.

I'd like to know if there is UPS support - for instance through NUT (Network UPS Tools) in this beta version.

Aristotle Jones said...

Brilliant work! Easily installed to a 4 gig usb, built a RADIZ with no effort. the services page is awesome. Love it so far!

Anonymous said...

i have to agree, without clear ISCSI set-up and use and limited other functionality its only worth an Alpha sticker right now.

OC GNU/kFreeBSD http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODg0Ng
is fun too, as i like to have the option to run and play with REBOL/ORCA, far more Fun than Python

Anonymous said...

Hi,

I've just finished playing with version 8 Beta (5698) and have a few comments on it.

1) It seems a little unstable - I had swap errors, the GUI died ended up having to reboot it.

2) ZFS seems a little flakey. You can't import existing pools into version 8 and see them in the GUI. The zpool import works but there's no apparent way to make the GUI see them.

3) You can't seem to create multiple shares in a pool? There's a 1-2-1 relationship and that's it?

freenas# zpool list
NAME SIZE USED AVAIL CAP HEALTH ALTROOT
data 3.62T 159K 3.62T 0% ONLINE -
temp-data 928G 328G 600G 35% ONLINE -

freenas# zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
data 108K 2.67T 31.4K /mnt/data
temp-data 328G 586G 328G /mnt/temp-data

I'd expect to create a pool and then create whatever shares I want in that pool.

i.e.

freenas# zfs create data/share1
freenas# zfs create data/share2
freenas# zfs create data/share3

freenas# ls /mnt/data
share1 share2 share3

Your current GUI wont do this.

I'd suggest that your Beta is actually more like a Alpha with regard to ZFS and functionality. Don't get me wrong it's great you've done all of this but it needs a lot more work on the ZFS side of things to make it worthwhile as a ZFS appliance.

Anonymous said...

I'm looking forward to this new release and hope it can still be installed to a CF Card. Will it be possible to add the support software for the 3ware RAID cards so we can configure and check our raid drives within FreeNas? Currently it does not seem possible to add the utility to support the card and drives.

Unknown said...

Is there a developers release or snapshots that the community can get involved with contributing to?

also any information channels on development forurm/blog/wiki/mailing lists?

Thanks

Unknown said...

Warner, I wish to use NFS shares from the freenas and currently you only support the -mapall=root option. Could you add support for -maproot=root for the export? This works out much better as all users are mapped to their own uid on the NFS share and root on the client machine may write to the NFS share as local root. I don't like the -mapall=root option and would never use it anyway.

thanks for the hard work.

Nicholas Aronne said...

Around when are you expecting the first GA release of 0.8 to be available. I know there are still a few items open on the punch list, but an approximation would be nice.

thanks

Anonymous said...

I have to wait for the upgrade from 7 version.
Thanks a lot for continuing this project!

Anonymous said...

Is there any reason an awesome project like this was sold out to a corporation? What a real shame. I wonder about all the features ppl are already saying are missing/dumbed down.. Will they appear in a "paid" version down the road? What about this "new" stuff dealing with installs? Are people like myself screwed if we have headless units? Maybe I'll be wrong, and I hope so, but every single project that I have been part of totally crapped out and became useless when a business "took it over". I can not be more sad right now over this.

Warner Losh said...

@anonymous: I think you are wrong and are being too pessimistic.

Anonymous said...

Hola yo trato de instalar la version beta 8 y no me deja finalizar la instalacion, me pide ya en el shell el login y contrseña que supuestamente es admin y freenas y se queda trabado. Que sucede? alguien tiene una ligera ayuda

Martin said...

Hi ... any news / release date or new beta for freenas8? Very interested to test it. Hope to have a release of freenas8 soon :-) ... the entry on ixsystem about beta is missing!

Carmen Lúcia said...

Can I install FreeNAS on a BlackArmor NAS?

Thanks.

Anonymous said...

Does anybody here get to authenticate on AD ?

Anonymous said...

Does anybody here get to authenticate on AD ?

Unknown said...

Does anybody here get authenticate on AD ???

Unknown said...

Warner, I am eagerly waiting for this...I will be installing the beta to check and test out few things but when can I expect the final release ? any approximate timeline is much appreciated ?

Unknown said...

Warner, moving to freebsd 8 is a great step forward. I will be installing the beta to check and test out few things but when can I expect the final release ? any approximate timeline is much appreciated.

thanks for all the effort!

Unknown said...

I hope that the final release have more services like the 0.7 series. For example UPS support and email reports.
And I lost all my data in the upgrade, but I think that it could be possible not to lose it, using the shell. But I'm only testing FreeNAS with few disks and the loss wasn't great. However in the future I will use about 10 drives and lose all of data in the upgrades will be dramatic.
Great job to the team and best regards.

rexxor said...

Only one thing is missing - quotta support. Without enabled quotas Freenas will be unusable for clients. I can not provide designated space for our employees... because everybody overlays disk capacity if it is possible

Anonymous said...

Hi Warner,
I have looked (maybe not not hard enough) but am unable to confirm whether Marvel sata controller 88SE61XX used on Intel 975XBX2 boards is supported in FREEBSD 8 and by that token whether your FreeNas 8 RC3 has caought up to the versions to have that support built in. If the support is there, you are going to make me a happy guy as I have two quad core servers waiting to take the FREENAS plunge.

Many thanks! TA

Nick said...

I look forward to a full release and most imnportantly an easy way to upgrade from .7.

I disagree with the user who says that LDAP is important, if a business is installing this sort of technology then they can pay for a commwercial NAS.

To me FreeNAs is great as it makes decent and configurable NAS available to all. It also allows you to use older hardware that would otherwise be thrown away, so in many respects FreeNAS is green technology!!!

Please ensure that version .7 users have an easy upgrade path. I use Ubuntu Linux and am getting reasonable good on it. I really dont want to have to learn another Linuix flavour, just to install the latest release of FreeNAS.

I like FreeNAS and wish you all good luck, but please listen to you users.

Nick

Anonymous said...

i also does not look forward to Freenas 8, i stay on 7 too.

sdproto said...

What's up with the ticket system? What do you need to do to get CREATE privileges? I've been testing and have feedback, but no way to provide it if I can't create tickets. Thanks

Anonymous said...

Love it, but would it be possible to add a TEST button on the email alert settings page to verify your email settings work in case of a failure?