FreeBSD fans rally round zVault upstart TrueNAS is alive and well, but iXsystems has shifted its focus to the Linux-based SCALE edition. For the FreeBSD faithful left clinging to CORE, a new contender is limbering up: zVault. The zVault project is a new all-FOSS OS for network-attached storage (NAS) servers, based on FreeBSD 13.3. The project has just unleashed its …
> a merge of the Xigma and zVault projects....
That could be interesting.
As far as I can tell, as a simplification, XigmaNAS is a fork and continuation of pre-iXsystems FreeNAS, with the original webUI written in PHP.
ZVault is a fork of TrueNAS Core, with a new UI written in a mixture of Python and Javascript using Angular.
The new UI looks better to me, but I am not fond of either PHP or of Javascript, myself.
XigmaNAS has advantages in deployment: you can boot it straight off a USB key and run it from there, or you can boot from some read-only medium like a CD and run it from there with config and state held on a USB key or something, or you can install it locally like a normal OS.
Snag: getting it running is a complicated as there are many choices.
TrueNAS Core has to be installed on a local drive and it recommends an SSD, although one of my boxes is running from an old spinning 120GB notebook HDD in an external caddy connected over E-SATA and it runs very well.
Not very flexible, but simple and works.
The problem is that I suspect, but do not know, that neither team will have a lot of interest in the other's choices.
They replaced Kubernetes with Docker - not exactly the same thing at the enterprise level - and changed also the virtualization layer moving to Incus - meaning it's now just an "experimental" feature.
So unless you plan to use it just as a ZFS NAS, you'll encouinter compatibilty issues as long as they don't settle on a specific toolset and keep available for long enough. Scale looks more a rolling beta than a stable solution. Im' afraid it will take time before it gets stable enough. Better than their disastrous attempt with "Corral", but still unpolished.
PS: not all versions can be directly upgrade from BSD to Linux - you may need to upgrade to an older release and the update it to the newer ones.
I run a home system on Scale just to keep in the loop on it. Although I'm not actually a fan of the hyper-converged-do-it-all-home-stuff-docker-apps focus I figured I couldn't complain if I didn't try it, so jumped in with both feet. So It's my NAS, my Hypervisor (including my router) and my apps thingybob. The whole thing replicates over to a 2nd 'core' box I keep elsewhere.
Just tried to move it from 24 to 25 and the shift to Incus and it totally torpedoes my VMs because I used an underscore in the zvol names. And then I find they want to hide them all in a hidden 'ixsystems' type hidden dataset like the storage for APPs. This doesn't sit well with the granular way I have them snapshot and replicate, so removes a lot of what I was achieving with ZFS in the first place.
Business SAN boxes are all still FreeBSD based. They need to serve iSCSI and NFS and not crash. So far, I'm keen to keep them as they are.
One of the attractions of ZFS is the low-overhead snapshots, excellent if your system is hit be ransomware.
But that presumes that the vulnerabilities that allowed it are not able to take over the ZFS host. Having FreeBSD for your NAS and Linux/Windows for your clients allowed that, making the NAS Linux-based removes one aspect of such security.
Indeed there are, such as applying AppArmor, having user-writable areas set to no-execute, etc. But also there are always new ways to take over being discovered (even if at a lesser rate than MS gets pwaned). If your ZFS host is on a different OS you can hope said new-takeover flaw is not common to both.
Assuming you don't use the same administrator credentials of course...
I'm eagerly anticipating the first stable release of zVault.
As someone who has used FreeNAS (as it was) since release 8, I have a couple of nicely stable jails that I have no interest in migrating to Docker containers and see no benefit in migrating away from the ultra stable and reliable FreeBSD system which has served me so well over the years and three hardware platforms. My Proxmox cluster only uses my NAS for backup and image storage, so I'm very happy sticking with NFS mounts from the NAS for that. I'm more than happy to follow the old adage of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"!
Now that iXsystems have moved to their SCALE version, the company's forums are overrun with Linux users who seem unable to read documentation or FAQs before asking questions, lowering the signal to noise ratio significantly.
> … overrun with Linux users who seem unable to read documentation or FAQs before asking questions, lowering the signal to noise ratio significantly.
https://forums.truenas.com/tags/c/truenas-general/4/scale
Without judging the quality: I would not describe a few posts a day as "overrun".
When FreeNAS went, I followed the XigmaNAS route and have been happy with it for years. Not that I do anything exciting - ZFS on a handful of drives, root on ZFS, copying snapshots across to a sibling server every night, a few shares, UPS & S.M.A.R.T. monitoring, that is all I want. The web UI is not flashy (good) but does all I've needed.
Basically, it just sits there, working, all very boring. The interesting stuff can then go on on the machines that talk to the NAS.
> The interesting stuff can then go on on the machines that talk to the NAS.
Concur. This is what I want too.
Which is why, for instance, my Pi-hole is a separate box:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/08/pi_hole_6_flyby/
It's a Pi 3B. It's tiny, silent, passively-cooled, uses a trickle of power, and if we go away for a week or two, I'll just leave it.
My NAS boxes are much larger, noisier, consume much more power, and if I don't need them for a while I want to turn them off.
A home setup is not the same as a small business one, which isn't the same as an enterprise one. Simplicity and low complexity beats efficiency or ease of management.
The snag is, enterprises pay £LOTS and SMEs pay £QUITE_A_BIT while home users don't want to pay. So vendors are seduced into chasing the big businesses, and they neglect the grass roots from which they grew.
https://www.theregister.com/2013/07/16/netware_4_anniversary/
Having a few small dedicated gadgets is preferable to one smart multi-function one. Split things up and bits can be turned on and off, or upgraded, or whatever, without worrying about the others.
jordanhubbard comments on RE-Evaluating TrueNAS from the Historical Perspective... (August 2022):
https://www.reddit.com/r/truenas/comments/wfevxe/reevaluating_truenas_from_the_historical/iivy6ea/
> a screengrab
Liam, you might like to add the origin: https://github.com/zvaultio/Community/issues/8#issuecomment-2781854709
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