TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin (22.12) is the natural successor to Angelfish (22.02). After 3 months of testing and two BETA versions, RC1 quality has been achieved with the RELEASE still planned for December. We’d like to thank the 1,000 BETA testers that have provided their time and systems.

Angelfish (22.02.4) is feature-complete and the next update is Bluefin which includes bug fixes, improvements, and new features. Testers and Early Adopters can try out (and roll back) Bluefin if looking for the next level of TrueNAS. Release Candidate implies that BETA testing and lab testing have gone well with no major issues and there is little risk to user data. However, early adopters should expect and report bugs that can be resolved in later versions. We always welcome testing and feedback.

What’s New in Bluefin?

Diving deeper, Bluefin inherits all the functional capabilities of Angelfish and also includes hundreds of bug fixes and new features, including the following:

• Storage WebUI delivers some massive improvements in pool, device, and dataset management, and provides more comprehensive information on single web pages. 

• Kubernetes CSI Driver for Clusters – External Kubernetes clusters can use TrueNAS SCALE as the storage cluster. TrueNAS SCALE can support Kubernetes CSI, VMware ESXi, and OpenStack Cinder, as well as provide file and object storage services.
• Docker OverlayFS  – OverlayFS support within OpenZFS enables greatly reduced overhead when running Container workloads.  
• Virtualization Improvements – The range of GPUs that can be passed through now includes Alderlake integrated GPUs and GeForce-30 Nvidia GPUs for VMs and Containers. USB device pass-through and CPU pinning are enabled.
• Wireguard VPN Access – Wireguard App will enable straightforward remote access to a system and its Apps. Play or work from home or office.
• iX-Storj service  – Globally Distributed Storage with Web3.0 techniques is a game-changer for cloud storage reliability, costs, and performance.
• Storage performance improvements – TrueNAS SCALE has now had 6 months of performance testing and bug fixes. Improvements in encryption, NFS, and iSCSI performance are most notable. 
• Enterprise Support – Maturing of HA support will enable Enterprise deployments of SCALE. Additionally, major work has been included which allows a TrueNAS SCALE system to support more than several hundred physical disks connected to a single system.
• Cluster Feature Improvements – Additional functionality for cluster lifecycle management includes better visibility into clusters as well as UI driven tools for repairing faulted clusters or replacing individual nodes. A later version of Bluefin will also include Gluster snapshots – executed via ZFS snapshots. These capabilities will be made visible in a future version of TrueCommand.
• Security Enhancements – API keys can enable fine-grained, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and restrict root privileges. CLI-Driven “Root-less” restricted administration accounts can be enabled and be used to further improve Ransomware protection. FIPS 140-3 compliant crypto modules will allow use in high security use-cases.

Joining the School of Bluefin

Bluefin will be an easy upgrade from SCALE Angelfish when it is released. The Bluefin RC1 release is now available and recommended for testers and early adopters. The software status of TrueNAS editions is tracked here.

We appreciate all the feature requests, development contributions, and testing that has already gone into Bluefin. There is an enormous list of Bluefin changes available in the release notes, which includes over 1,000 improvements and fixes.  

We want to thank the community for the tremendous support in improving TrueNAS SCALE quality! It’s been an exciting ride and there’s much more to come, so please keep making suggestions and reporting bugs as we continue to improve the quality of TrueNAS SCALE together.