FreeNAS is Now called TrueNAS 12, Get the Latest News

It’s official, the popular NAS server-oriented operating system, FreeNAS, will never be called that in the next versions that come out. Now FreeNAS is called TrueNAS, and the free version of this operating system (the equivalent to FreeNAS) is TrueNAS CORE 12. Just yesterday the stable and final version of TrueNAS 12 was released, with the latest news of the FreeBSD operating system and all the software built-in by default. Are you interested in setting up your own NAS server? Then don’t miss all the details of TrueNAS below.

FreeNAS changes its name to TrueNAS

TrueNAS CORE 12 is still an updated and renamed FreeNAS, at least for now, since it is true that it has the latest software, security and bug fixes. iXsystems already has the operating systems platform for NAS, both in its free offer (the old FreeNAS) as well as in business ones. From now on we will have the possibility to install the latest version available from the TrueNAS Core operating system itself in its beta or RC versions, specifically, if we go to “System / Update” we can see that there is a new version of very few MB in size to upgrade.

FreeNAS is Now called TrueNAS 12

The company behind the FreeNAS project, decided to unify all NAS-oriented systems, both “Core” which is the free version, and the enterprise versions. Now that we have the final version of TrueNAS 12, it is a good time to update, since since the first RC version many errors have been found and they have been corrected in this version that now sees the light. However, you may be interested in waiting until the first maintenance release, TrueNAS 12.0 U1, which is scheduled for December, is released.

Main features of the new TrueNAS CORE 12

This new version of TrueNAS Core 12 is still completely open source and offers the same functionalities, and many more features. In this latest version, important changes have been incorporated in the ZFS file system, specifically all the next changes to OpenZFS 2.0 have been added, in addition, we also have other important improvements in this latest version of TrueNAS:

  • Native encryption in ZFS: we can encrypt the dataset, and it supports encrypted replication to untrusted destinations.
  • Second authentication factor: we can enter the system with a second authentication factor using TOTP with Google Authenticator or Latch.
  • Performance improvements in SMB, iSCSI, ZFS and more, all embedded software has been completely updated.
  • API Keys: We can now configure TrueNAS API v2.0 and it now supports API keys for remote access.
  • Fusion Pools: now we can create pools with all-flash vdevs to store metadata in small blocks.
  • Onboarding VPN, TrueNAS can now act as OpenVPN server and client.

This new operating system is installed in the same way as the rest of this type of operating system, we need a USB memory or a CD / DVD to boot it on the server, and later we will need a hard disk or SSD where to store the operating system. It is not possible to store the operating system on a disk, and use that same disk as data storage in ZFS.

Other basic recommendations when installing TrueNAS Core 12 to use it as a NAS server, is to have at least a total of 8GB of ECC RAM memory (with error correction), however, a general recommendation is that the maximum is used RAM as possible, since ZFS with deduplication uses a lot of RAM, and everything will work much faster. Another noteworthy aspect before installing it is that at least the hard disk or SSD where we install it must have 16GB of capacity, in addition, the hard drives for storage are highly recommended that they be SATA3 with AHCI activated in BIOS and that they be with technology CMR. Finally, if you are going to install 10Gbps Ethernet network cards, we must make sure that the chipset is compatible with the operating system, the iXsystems team recommends Intel chipset to avoid driver problems.

We recommend you access the official website of TrueNAS CORE 12 where you will find all the details and the download of this NAS-oriented operating system with the ZFS file system.