FreeNAS Corral Canned – Development Essentially Halted for Now

[chief_j]

@SaltyPeanuts - I get the same feeling as @PigLover reading their forums. There's a lot of walking back from the cliff in their statements. It just seems like it was ultimately bad decisions somewhere, and a rush to production. To be completely honest though, they could flip on a dime in a month and call the current Corral the supported code base, and then update the UI from there, which is scary.

As an early adopter, I'll definitely be feeling the pain. I'm all for looking at other products as well. I would me more than happy to assist anyone in evaluating other products as well.

 

[OBasel]

yeah i see what you are saying @PigLover but i still dont see anywhere where it says freenas corral is dead so i dont understand what u meant with evolving language.

There's a lot of spin in that post by Kris. I mean "lack of feature parity with 9.10 (Jails, iSCSI, etc)," You're kidding me right? Google FreeBSD Jails versus Docker and see what the difference is in resources and adoption. Jails had like 14 plugins? Hub.docker.com has what? Hundreds of thousands supported by their organizations?

Here's the next one:

The quicker path to a properly stable and enterprise-worthy Corral is to rebase upon the solid FreeNAS 9.10 code, bringing some of the new features that the current FreeNAS Corral offers into a more mature and solid platform. This process has already begun with the inclusion of VM container support and a brand-new Angular-based UI which is already available in the 9.10 nightlies (more on this below).

"Some of the new features" not all and in the nightly. So as of today, FreeNAS does not have a stable release with bhyve, Docker, or a responsive UI. The async jobs were also a feature I really liked. If you had bigger arrays efficiency gains from that system were big time.

There's the OLD feeling 9.10 which is really long in the tooth.

There's the nightly build with a new UI. What I'm confused about is the timing. They are announcing the change today, and they already have AngularJS working? Didn't the Corral UI take over 6 months to do? I'm reading either that it was an easier conversion than they said previously and therefore there's more going on in Corral than they let on OR they released Corral already knowing that the rewrite was happening and so why release it. This might be why a lot of us lost a lot of trust and faith in the FreeNAS team. Something with the timing seems off.

There's a "Tech Preview" Corral that's been out for a month BUT stuff like the middleware seems not mentioned. Either way, not importable.

So if you've been using new Corral features you're marooned subject to retreat to a 9.10 that I think most of us would have been happy to ditch.

They may call it Corral but here are the three operative parts I'm reading:

“This also means it is unlikely you will be able to migrate configuration settings from Corral -> the next FreeNAS Corral product (however, your data will always be importable).”

That means whatever you built in Corral isn't migratable. That's basically a translation for a rewrite. It's a life your ZFS pools and bring them back.

Reading responses here, I think the largest issue is that the FreeNAS team has lost community trust. I spent hours setting up users, permissions, learning how Corral work and then deciding to put services on what they called a "stable" platform, until now it isn't.

Maybe it's time to ditch FreeNAS?

• napp-it with @gea
• OMV OpenMediaVault - The open network attached storage solution
• unraid (but I'm not going there)
• Ubuntu with ZFS?
• If Proxmox gets a mediocre ZFS Admin UI, I'm there in a second.

I know napp-it guys love solarish but if someone added ZFS to OMV or melded napp-it for Proxmox or even just did FreeNAS on Ubuntu ZFS, that's it. No more FreeNAS.

 

[Patriot]

I prefer linux to freebsd from a driver standpoint... so I am eagerly waiting for OMV 3.0 to leave beta.
I have enjoyed the jails of freebsd but on my current box I have duplicates of half of them because a reboot broke them.
Freebsd is easy when it works.

 

[chilipepperz]

@OBasel that's a wall of text. skimming, that's a long winded summary.

FreeNAS needs a complete rebrand now. This was the FreeNAS equivalent of the Samsung Note 7 exploding battery. When a product goes completely sideways after launch you've gotta put the brand out to pasture.

Call it FreeNAS 11 Edge.

 

[OBasel]

Sorry for the wall.

@Patriot what's for OMV 3.0 is there a release date? I made a thread but I'm seeing ZFS? OpenMediaVault and ZFS - It works?

 

[Nnyan]

I'm glad I only have 10 running on a test box. Kind of sucks since I thought I had found my ESXi replacement. What troubles me the most is that they released this code and only b/c this blew up did they do a deep enough dive to find all these filesystem problems that will take them too much time to fix??? Smells alot like a beta as a final.

 

[SaltyPeanuts]

@chief_j i see is bunch of happy people on the freenas forums saying how great the new angular UI us lol. I mean you can try to analyze what they meant but it looked pretty clear to me where the directions were going. my point is to ask why this article was published saying freenas corral is dead because that isnt what is said at all. seems very sensational. I like to believe people would tell the truth especially when the freenas developers had the honesty to admit they messed up.

my point is simple that the way this article from servethehome was presented it looked like mud slinging to me which is why i don't like it personally. makes me question the people writing it and have biases. i think we can all agree freenas devs made a mistake. granted im a FreeNAS fan if you can't tell. i lurk on the freenas forums a lot and the majority seem very happy with this new direction.

You aren't wrong the old coral ui took forever but they were using some ancient framework. they were discussing in irc that it only took less than 3 weeks to have a functional angular UI. have u looked at angular ? i do some programming and angular seems a lot better because of a more active developer base. the new angular UI is fully functional in nightly builds. you should try it out yourself before making conclusions. for me it works much better already than the corral interface and i get to have the stability of my 9.x version. #winning

 

[K D]

I had finally decided to move from a RAID setup to ZFS and started with FreeNAS. Just finished backing up my arrays and copying about 36 TB into one freenas corral host. The second one has about 15 TB left to go. I hope the data can be imported directly into an 9.10 installation without having to recreate the pools.

 

[chilipepperz]

@SaltyPeanuts Here's another angle. You have 4 posts and seem to be the only pro-freenas developer person here largely regurgitating what they said.

All of the STH members who registered before that post was made today, and who went through the trouble of learning Corral, seem to be displeased with this change in direction. I'm seeing general unhappiness here.

And sorry, this seems totally crazy to me:

my point is simple that the way this article from servethehome was presented it looked like mud slinging to me which is why i don't like it personally. makes me question the people writing it and have biases. i think we can all agree freenas devs made a mistake. granted im a FreeNAS fan if you can't tell.

Um...
Welcome to the FreeNAS Corral era - It is finally here!
FreeNAS Corral - A Tipping Point for the Popular NAS OS - Our Interview with Jordan Hubbard
AND LET"S NOT FORGET TODAY ON STH Quick Tips for Running a Ubiquiti UniFi Controller on FreeNAS Corral in Docker

Forgive me if something smells fishy here. STH and it's members I think are very pro FreeNAS.

i lurk on the freenas forums a lot and the majority seem very happy with this new direction.

Oh and as of right now the announcement thread Important announcement regarding FreeNAS Corral has 31 posts. 9 of 31 are from Kris on the FreeBSD team so I expect those are positive.

Of the 22 remaining, there are nuggets like #25. And there are more unhappy users here in this thread than are in that thread... and FreeNAS sells systems STH doesn't.

We don't get many of that tone of post here, so it may just be a coincidence that:
New member who signed up after that article was posted
Seems to not have read anything else on STH
Fiercely pro FreeNAS wasting our time by getting us on a hanging chad of a release.
Attacking a pro-FreeNAS site for writing something legit

I mean... can I say what we're all thinking?

 

[Patrick]

@chilipepperz I am going to request that you keep this civil.

@SaltyPeanuts I did ask for comments and welcome them. I am working to setup time with Kris tomorrow. I would agree that we do feature a lot of FreeNAS content. I have personally made introductions for the FreeNAS team to vendor contacts I have in order to help their future products, given opinions on hardware/ software design and gave feedback to iXsystems execs, in person, a few weeks ago about features I really liked and product direction.

STH does not sell storage, we have no competing software and I am a big fan of FreeNAS. I actually think AngularJS is a better direction but this is not a UI upgrade to Corral.

and for those that reported the post above, @SaltyPeanuts took the time to write it so I will let it stand. Of course, the tone/ tenor of the message speaks for itself as does the fact that the poster is using a known proxy server.

 

[ttabbal]

[*]If Proxmox gets a mediocre ZFS Admin UI, I'm there in a second.
.

It's got a mediocre UI, SSH.

The pain of managing ZFS on the command line is overstated. There are only a few commands to learn. Some of the extras like UI for scrub and SMART jobs would be nice, but a little shell time with cron has that running on my machines.

That said, I do wish it had even half of the FreeNAS UI for that stuff.

There's also this
..

napp-it // webbased ZFS NAS/SAN appliance for OmniOS, OpenIndiana, Solaris and Linux : Linux

 

[KioskAdmin]

So 10 is not considered stable anymore? And I can't take settings from yesterday's stable to the next one.

That sucks that it was canned. But stuff happens. I don't find myself caring 9.10 other than I'm not grateful for the time I've lost.

Moral of this is not to build HCI on niche platforms like FreeNAS. I'm grateful for the work they do so I'll probably use the free version solely for ZFS storage. I'm also forlorn at facing a manufacturing cust tomorrow where we today pitched buying a mini XL with Corral to run domain services and lightweight logging as HCI. Now I need to add another box to the quote. I can't in good faith tell them to use FreeNAS HCI if it changes like this.

Sucks since I wanted to support. 9.10 or 10 base matters not. I'll just never get back that time.

 

[RTM]

I had been considering to give FreeNAS corral a go on my NAS, with this and with some issues I've experienced on FreeNas 9 in mind, that idea is at least postponed a couple of years.

 

[Fritz]

I'll be sticking with FreeNAS. I was happy with 9.10 before and I'm happy with it again. Nothing has really changed. Just a glitch in the Matrix. We'll all live through it.

 

[mackle]

Took me a while to even believe what I was reading with this development.

Although I was squarely in the market for what corral was offering (namely better VM handling for low-power hyper-convergence), I was thankfully waiting it out until it bedded down more. So I hadn't yet made the move over.

I can thank a number of user's posts in this forum for my decision to wait - so thanks folks.

 

[chief_j]

@KioskAdmin - After messing with the beta's for what seemed like forever, then updating my homelab stuff to Corral, I can say that the UI is still super buggy. Some settings are non-existent, and it seems like I have a better experience in Firefox vs. Chrome, and even page refreshes take forever. the CLI was slightly better, but by far not perfect.

- Over all, if there's more support within the company for 9.10.x code base, great. It just really sucks that it's going to take me a while to get everything back to a more well-supported train.

 

[SaltyPeanuts]

hmmm i apologize if i have not been sensitive to your feelings sirs. yes i registered to say what i am thinking. I do not agree with what you said about freenas and still no one has made me good arguments about the inaccuracies presented in this story. you grab foil hats and accuse me of being a bad person because i use encryption to prevent people from hacking the IP address. it is good i did use encryption because you were looking for the ip and could have done malicious things. people are allowed different opinions here no?? i feel like you are targeting me for disagreeing with you.

the corral ui was not good. if you test it you must know this but 9.x has always worked well. It is clear to me that the writer does not care how good freenas 9 is because he used mirrored usb sticks for backup. men with beards (and large arrays) prefer freeNAS 9 because is is stable and wont lose your data.

 

[PigLover]

@SaltyPeanuts, you are crossing the line from discussion to insult. Please take care to control your emotions. Facts and debate are OK here. If you could, sir, please point out the inaccuracies in Patrick's story. You keep referring to them but you've not pointed out which part of the article you find inaccurate. Simply insulting a test configuration choice and then questioning his manhood is not debate. While this type of behavior has run rampant on the FreeNAS forums for years - it is not welcome here.

Getting to the facts of your post: nothing about FreeNAS 9 vs 10 suggests any data loss. The correct statement is "FreeBSD/ZFS is stable and won't lose your data", which applies equally to FreeNAS 9 and 10. At the end of the day, FreeNAS 9 (and 10) is nothing more than a UI stuck on top of the OS that does the heavy lifting of data protection for you, giving you a convenient way to expose ZFS, Samba, NFS, and the other features of FreeBSD that your apparent employer IXsystems builds upon.

Readers here know this. They also know that there are alternative systems that also expose ZFS and its inherent safety. The current internal turmoil IXsystems is exposing creates impetus for us to explore these options. If you really care about FreeNAS 9, as it appears you do, you'll clean up your discussion tactics before you drive even more people to flee FreeNAS permanently.

 

[TangoWhiskey9]

@chilipepperz

Um... saltypeanuts = Kris ?

If you read the FreeNAS forums, reddit, here the only one writing walls of text supporting the decision is Kris and salty is screenshotting Kris' opinions and citing as the only one that matters.

Plus, I have 15 freenas boxes and I never even realized there's a freenas irc. You've gotta be close to the dev teams to be acting like this. Must be either Kris, an ix employee or a groupie.

I'd welcome Kris, ix employees and FN groupies but it needs to stay stable. I like the community here but there's two people acting like this on the internet. Kris and salty.

 

[ecosse]

The nice thing about the world now is there is choice. I think if someone releases a storage related product that can't be trusted to hold data with reliability and integrity they deserve any rotten fruit that comes flying their way. Mind you, I've seen some strange things with ReFS so even closed source tier 1 vendors need a second chance now and again.
For what its worth, you would think its not exactly what iXsystems/FreeNas or whoever would have wanted to do about something they've only just released. Probably worth a deep breath, a few pints and see the lie of the land in a few weeks before jumping on something else (and making sure you're backup is working in the meantime!)