TrueNAS 13.0 retains all the TrueNAS 12.0 services and middleware while providing significant improvements in security, availability, quality, and performance. After testing by over 20,000 users over the last 2 months, the first update (TrueNAS 13.0-U1) is now ready for larger and more critical use cases.

The significant new components of TrueNAS 13.0 were described in the Release Blog. These included:

• FreeBSD 13.0 performance security, and efficiency improvements
• OpenZFS 2.1 performance and reliability improvements 
• Samba 4.15 security vulnerability resolution
• iSCSI target bandwidth increases
• NFS server: Improved NFS 4.x support

TrueNAS 13.0-U1 includes over 100 bug fixes and improvements, including the major items below:

• Proactive alerts for Capacity Monitoring
• Improvements to ZFS replication reliability
• Further Drive Scaling improvements for 1200+ Drives on a single system
• Support for Azure backup custom endpoints – Allowing usage of government clouds
• Fixed an issue with UI-driven disk replacements
• Corrected several memory leaks edge cases
• Enabled out-of-box support for Realtek RTL8125 network devices

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).

Thanks to a major contribution of hard drives to the TrueNAS test lab from Western Digital, TrueNAS 13.0 passed comprehensive large-scale testing on a TrueNAS M60-HA with over 1,200 drives in use by a single controller. With TrueNAS 13.0-U1, the drive scalability validation has extended to TrueCommand 2.2, allowing it to be used on massive scale NAS systems with little performance impact. It was great to see the TrueNAS 13.0-U1 system with 1200 drives failover in less than 1 minute when under high load. This was a greater than 95% reduction from previous releases and would significantly improve system availability.

TrueNAS 13.0 is the highest performing TrueNAS version for single node and HA deployments.  Performance improvements of 30% are expected for some CPU-bound workloads. Below are the comparisons with TrueNAS 12.0 for some NFS and iSCSI workloads on an all-flash system.

TrueNAS 13.0-U1 is another Major Milestone
TrueNAS 13.0 has progressed quickly to the UPDATE stages. Because the TrueNAS 13.0 changes are less complex, it has matured much more rapidly than previous TrueNAS releases.. There is a TrueNAS 13.0 sub-forum on the Community forums for this accelerated process and Community feedback. Thousands of users have already reported a smooth 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. The documentation now has the ability to comment on any page. Please use this if you think the documentation advice is missing or needs more clarity.

SMB users with security concerns should look at updating. TrueNAS makes it easy to update and rollback if there are any issues. Users are also encouraged to check 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 22.02.2 was made available earlier in June.

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 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, 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, contact us.