TrueNAS 13.0 reached its RELEASE milestone today and is the natural successor to TrueNAS 12.0-U8, which has been the most widely deployed and highest quality TrueNAS version ever. TrueNAS 13.0 retains all the TrueNAS 12.0 services and middleware while providing significant improvements in security, availability, quality, and performance.

The significant new components of TrueNAS 13.0 are:

FreeBSD 13.1: FreeBSD 13.1 includes thousands of improvements and numerous iXsystems contributions. There are major improvements to cryptography, networking, drivers, and NUMA scheduling. The Plugins and jails can now run with version 13.0 compatibility and the significant performance improvements increase IOPS and bandwidth for larger NAS systems by up to 20%.

OpenZFS 2.1: OpenZFS 2.0 was a huge quality success in TrueNAS 12.0. OpenZFS 2.1 extends the improvements in reliability and performance even further. One iX contribution reduces the ZFS pool import times by making the process more parallel. System restart and failover times are reduced by more than 80% for larger systems, which reduces downtime and increases system availability.

Samba 4.15: The Samba 4.15 release has important security improvements and virtual file system improvements that ensure SMB support is secure and robust.

iSCSI target: TrueNAS 13.0 includes support for larger native I/O sizes and general performance improvements. These will translate into more bandwidth on backup and archive systems. Larger scale performance testing results will be released in the coming months.

NFS server: TrueNAS 13.0 includes NFS support for nconnect. This allows multiple TCP connections from a Linux client to operate in parallel and provides higher and more robust performance. This can increase single-client performance on high-speed networks by as much as 400%.

Note: With the release of TrueNAS 13.0, the expectation was that we would inherit the FReeBSD NFS server improvements. One of those was NFS nconnect. Refer to the forum post for more info.  The bug-ID is here: NAS-116262

Like TrueNAS 12.0, TrueNAS 13.0 is a single unified image that supports either TrueNAS CORE or TrueNAS Enterprise capabilities. TrueNAS Enterprise is delivered as TrueNAS appliances to organizations that want a turnkey experience. It also includes Enterprise features such as High Availability (HA), Fibre Channel, Pro-active Support, and Key Management (KMIP).

TrueNAS 13.0 is the highest performing TrueNAS version for single node and HA deployments. All the jails and plugin capabilities are maintained along with the storage services built into TrueNAS 12.0. The update from TrueNAS 12.0-U8 will be straightforward and driven entirely from the webUI. Thanks to a major contribution from WD, TrueNAS 13.0 passed comprehensive large-scale testing on a TrueNAS M60-HA with over 1,200 drives as shown in the iX lab below.

TrueNAS 13.0 RELEASE is a Major Milestone

TrueNAS 13.0 has progressed quickly to the RELEASE and UPDATE stages. Because the TrueNAS 13.0 changes are less complex, it is maturing faster than TrueNAS 12.0 or TrueNAS SCALE. There is a TrueNAS 13.0 sub-forum on the Community forums for this accelerated process and Community feedback. Hundreds of users have already reported a very normal software update experience from TrueNAS 12.0.

The new TrueNAS 13.0 documentation is based on the TrueNAS 12.0 docs, which were more modular and expandable. The Community is invited to edit, contribute, or simply provide feedback. Please check out the documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. 

SMB users with security concerns should look at updating in the next few months. TrueNAS makes it easy to update and rollback if there are any issues. Users are also encouraged to check on the TrueNAS forums to see the experiences of other users.

TrueNAS SCALE: The Path to Scale-out and Linux Support

TrueNAS 12.0 and TrueNAS 13.0 users also have an option to migrate to TrueNAS SCALE, which also supports Samba 4.15, NFS nconnect,  and OpenZFS 2.1 (in addition to other features), but is based on Debian Bullseye and not FreeBSD. Users looking for scale-out storage capabilities and/or Linux-friendly hyperconvergence with Kubernetes and KVM should also look at SCALE. TrueNAS SCALE 22.02.0 hit the RELEASE stage on “Twosday”, 2/22/22, and the first update 22.02.1 was delivered on May 3rd.

Users with storage-centric use cases (file, block, object) that are generally satisfied with TrueNAS 12.0 will find that upgrading to TrueNAS 13.0 will result in significant advantages without any major changes to features, data layout, and tools, or user interface.

TrueNAS CORE: Still the Best Free NAS

For those with TrueNAS 12.0 installed on your system, you can upgrade to TrueNAS 13.0 RELEASE easily. For new systems, download TrueNAS 13.0 and get started. TrueNAS Enterprise customers should contact iXsystems Technical Support for a complimentary technical review and assistance before updating.

TrueNAS 13.0 security, quality, and performance improvements should have a positive impact on your systems. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on our community forums, TrueNAS subreddit, or in response to this blog. If you need additional information on how TrueNAS can streamline, accelerate, and unify data management for your business, contact us.