TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE was made available yesterday (October 20, 2020), and with it, TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise are now ready for production deployments. The merger of FreeNAS and TrueNAS into a unified software image is now officially complete and has become a production-ready platform right on schedule.

With the merger of the software, we are also making progress toward a new and improved TrueNAS.com website, which is the future home of all things TrueNAS-related. The chart below describes the transition.

And, here is the long list of features and performance improvements.

Prior to this RELEASE version, almost 7,000 users were involved in putting TrueNAS 12.0 software through its paces. During the pre-RELEASE process, TrueNAS 12.0 demonstrated over 1.2 Million IOPS and over 23GB/s on a TrueNAS M60. TrueNAS 12.0 RC1 provided the stability needed to move many enthusiasts into production. Many thanks for the positive feedback and the bug reports, which were mostly minor or hardware-specific.

TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE is expected to be very solid and perform significantly better than the 11.3 versions. It is also the first production RELEASE of the OpenZFS 2.0 base. Snapshot your pool, backup your data, and try it out! You can download it here. There is a TrueNAS 12.0 sub-forum on the Community forums for this unification process and Community feedback.

An updated summary of the TrueNAS 12.0 features is below (with capabilities specific to TrueNAS Enterprise identified by the light blue text). As promised, no features were removed from FreeNAS 11.3, but many features have been added.

TrueNAS 12.0 Documentation is Improving

TrueNAS 12.0 has moved to a more modern documentation style that encourages contribution. The new documentation is more modular and expandable, but is not yet as complete and comprehensive as that of FreeNAS 11.3. Feel free to use both user guides while we complete the transition. Please check out the 12.0 documentation even if you don’t upgrade today. We’re grateful for all the contributions received thus far!

Storage Freedom with TrueNAS SCALE

One of the side benefits of the massive TrueNAS 12.0 and OpenZFS 2.0 work is TrueNAS SCALE. Last week we passed a milestone with the first version, TrueNAS SCALE 20.10 “Angelfish”. While it is based on 90% of the same software, SCALE is less mature but very promising. For most users, we recommend moving to TrueNAS 12.0 and OpenZFS 2.0. From there, users can stay with CORE or Enterprise editions or migrate in 2021 to SCALE for Linux services or scale-out functionality. We call this flexibility, “Storage Freedom”.

TrueNAS CORE: Still the Best Free NAS

We hope these TrueNAS 12.0 performance improvements have a positive impact on your FreeNAS systems. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them on the community forums, on the 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, please email us.

TrueNAS 12.0 Upgrades are Easy

For those with FreeNAS 11.3 installed on your system, you can upgrade to TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE with a single click! Otherwise, download TrueNAS 12.0 RELEASE to get started.
TrueNAS 12.0 can operate on all of the iXsystems platforms from the FreeNAS and TrueNAS Minis, to the power-efficient X-Series, all the way up to the flagship High availability (HA) M-Series. There is also a new R-Series product line that can run CORE, Enterprise, and SCALE editions of TrueNAS 12.0. A press release was also released yesterday on the TrueNAS R-Series and the first TrueNAS SCALE release.
For those with TrueNAS HA systems and support contracts, we recommended contacting iXsystems support to schedule an upgrade. We will verify your systems health, configuration, and support the upgrade process to minimize issues.