The basic jist is that some users are having stability issues with their VM data storage on TrueNAS 12.0-RELEASE and potentially TrueNAS 12.0-U1. The issues do not appear to be confirmed to be caused by TrueNAS, but (in my mind) warrant some further digging.
I am simply linking to the original post as the original author can explain his issues better than I can explain them since I have not encountered any of these issues myself.
I’m hoping this won’t turn into a widespread issue as that would be quite concerning. Anyone here run into any troubles with TrueNAS 12.0-U1?
Per what Chris Moore said “So far we’ve seen 30k+ systems upgrade to 12.0-RELEASE and 12.0-U1, and are not seeing any major influx of reports of data corruption like you are mentioning” and that was back in December 2020. I do not base my opinion on a products stability based on a few forum posts.
Ok I was hoping to receive some sort of reassurance after reading what seemed kind of concerning to me (as a novice FreeNAS user).
I figured if there was any major problem there would be a YT video from Tom right away!
It seems like if Chris is reporting 30k+ systems doing well maybe this user’s problem is not actually TrueNAS.
I updated my FreeNAS server to TrueNAS 12.0-U1 last Thursday evening. Yesterday the weekly scrub was done on my primary storage pool containing all my data on the spinning drives and it completed without any errors. Also my system SSD pool was scrubbed yesterday without errors.
I haven’t upgraded my ZFS pools yet. It is my understanding that you should wait a while I case you want to revert back to an older version. I’m using 4x 8TB WD Red drives in my primary storage pool. Haven’t noticed any problems on my end but this is just home usage and I’m not using my TrueNAS server for VM raw disk storage.
I’ll not write that much because there’s plenty of data on my thread and on my bug report. But I do not recommend upgrading to the 12.0 branch right now. Although the fix was mitigated by disabling the offending feature, iXsystems employees recommended staying at 11.3-U5 if you can:
I think one thing that has become a bit of an issue for TrueNAS core is the release cycle. FreeNAS would always come out with the new features first then sometime later TrueNAS would come out with an update with new features and perhaps bugfixes learned from FreeNAS deployments. Now with TrueNAS Core being the merged code base it is statistically likely to have more issues being that is is new, but if not enough people run the new version then scenarios won’t come up where these bugs can be found and fixed. But with the heavy burden placed on lots of internal IT departments it’s makes sense for them not too run the latest because they don’t have the time to deal with troubleshooting down production servers. All in all there are not any easy answers and I am happy this bug was found and fixed.
As someone who spends quite some time on the TrueNAS forums, I can only support what @ferrao says. There is a number of issues with TrueNAS 12, some of which aren’t even their direct responsibility (to avoid the word “fault”). The switch of the underlying FreeBSD alone, brought with it various driver issues.
My overall impression is that it is not an extreme risk to go for TrueNAS 12. But one should be prepared that some things (e.g. particular replication scenarios) do not work as expected.