That’s what I first thought, but it now seems that it is an extra UI layer in the cloud on top of the existing, local, TrueNAS UI.
Average Joe does not write and maintain hardware monitoring scripts… Just saying.
Obviously HexOS is not going to fix hardware issues, and is not going to point to the physical location of drives, unless maybe it’s running on specific hardware solutions from iX or from Eshtek.
That’s the catch. Learning (way) more than you expected about enterprise storage may be fun and positive if you’re a geek, but I expect the average user to count that as a negative, and possibly be ready to pay to be patronised into running his own NAS without engaging thoughts in the process.
If you can browse to “myhexos.com”, enter some credentials and then access the content of your NAS remotely without knowing anything about dynamic DNS and VPN connections, I can even see some value in the subscription for John Average Doe. But so far I’ve only seen mentions of remote management, not remote access.
Only time will tell whether it may works, or whether it will just bring in disaster because John A. Doe managed to repurpose his old overclocked gaming rig into a 24-wide raidz1 shelf of refurbished SMR drives thanks to a fancy and friendly wizard-in-the-cloud…
Thanks for contributing your valuable bit here!
Indeed, the name HexOS is misleading if the installer is plain TrueNAS. But I expect that there will be a “HexOS” installer, even if it is 99.9% TrueNAS and 0.1% of the hooks to the cloud HexOS interface.
Or maybe it should have been named as an “Appliance on Network”: HäxAN[1].
Bring the daemons in!
If you don’t read Swedish and/or are not versed in soft SM erotica from the Roaring Twenties, here’s the reference. ↩︎
That’s actually a good value-add that depends on a cloud service. “Your box reaches out to us, your client reaches out to us, we make everything work despite NAT, CG-NAT, or whatever else you have going on.”
Feels like a much better way of framing the product than “it’s just a fancy management layer”.
What are we, philistines? Who doesn’t know about niche North Germanic films from a century ago? We subsidize the European film industry to pretend that there’s art to be found ensure the continuation of our cultural heritage, you can’t just go and suggest that it’s not a part of our zeitgeist. People might start asking questions!
Because enterprise customers have business-class internet connections and uptime backed by SLAs for their cloud systems.
Consumers get to talk to someone who ask them to “turn it off and on again” and a myriad of other steps before they are told “there seems to be a system issue we will investigate, no ETR. Sorry!”. It’s apples-and-oranges experience-wise.
I think you’re missing the point that @7BitsShortOfAByte was making - people are making a big deal out of the cloud connection for a variety of reasons, yet plenty of Enterprise software also uses a similar model.
Of course SLA’s and internet speeds differ from enterprise to home, but chances are if that user’s internet is down then he’s got bigger problems than not being able to use “easy mode” on his server. But his server will continue to work locally, which is the main point in having the server at all.
This all makes complete sense to me and I think it’s a great way to get more folks into the TrueNAS ecosystem.
To me, the business model might make sense in the following manner:
Setup, config, etc is simplified via the online portal or whatever HexOS is classified as. Online portals allow quicker ecosystem-wide updates at the cost of having to figure out how to securely “hook” into TrueNAS effectively from the cloud.
day-to-day usage offers low-latency, performant file storage that the cloud cannot. Some semblance of data privacy. Another opportunity to monetize via allegedly-secure backups into the cloud.
HexOS may prove to iXsystems that subscriptions for NAS work, hence leading to subscriptions for TrueNAS as well. This is likely an irresistible $$$ temptation for iXsystems management with all the usual reasonings why we should subscribe rather than buy perpetual licenses.
This will likely lead to first adopters and more august users abandoning TrueNAS just like Sonos, 1Password, etc. as perpetual licenses or control over their machines / data are non-negotiable for that crowd.
That’s not quite fair to Unraid, their legacy licenses are lifetime licenses, and lifetime licenses are still available in their new pricing without any renewal required.
The new pricing isn’t a subscription either, it’s a perpetual license with a maintenance contract.
The HexOS guys also left Unraid around when the new pricing system was being brought in. I suspect we’ll see something other than a subscription for the product, considering Jon’s comments in the reddit thread linked in my previous comment.
honestly… try to answer this and if you do I think it would address the skeptics in this thread.
what value does having the “Management Plane” be on an outside server, vs having it locally hosted and accessed via NETBIOS or DNS resolution. is there any?
most people are assuming there isn’t any for the end user, that the only value is for HexOS which could see this as a form of vendor lock-in? I would love to know if there is a more compelling reasons for this choice.
realistically there is going to be some reason to architect it this way, after all cloud hosting and bandwidth aren’t cheap. considering the Plex argument, plex.tv handles authentication for remote users using your server, you can use it locally only but without that feature. there are reasons why you would want to use that product either way.
Its important to understand that TrueNAS is primarily designed to help IT people set-up secure NAS systems with highly tunable and configurable storage. There are quite a few challenges that this cloud management plane handles:
No changes to TrueNAS software for some new features
Setup with limited user technical knowledge (what is ZFS?)
Different UI optimized for specific use case
Automation can be added without changing software
Features that involve multiple systems (eg sharing/migrating data)
Features that require integration between TrueNAS and external clouds
Secure outsourcing of aspects of security management
These are all things that skilled TrueNAS users can do…but most people are not skilled TrueNAS users, nor do they have a willing friend.
My spouse likes Apple products for the simplicity. IT staff like Linux/FreeBSD for the flexibility and control.
Absolutely fair question. I had my Q&A with Robbie from NASCompares today and addressed this in detail. I’ll give a more “cliffs notes” version here, which includes some of what I’ve said in another post on Reddit.
Local DNS is an awful UX for the non-IT savvy. Depending on the device type, you may need to append “.local” to the hostname. Browsers get picky sometimes when you don’t type the “https://” first when entering a hostname, thinking you’re just entering a search term. And even if you get an SSL self-signed cert, you still have to go through that browser nag security warning when connecting via https. And let’s not forget about IP address changes and flushing of the local DNS cache. Us IT-savvy folk know how to deal with all of these challenges. We’ve been dealing with them since our first self-hosted solution when we were just wee lads. But we’re trying to bring this solution to a wider audience that doesn’t have that experience and that means solving for those problems. It’s the same reason why we use the HexOS connector. Sure we could tell users “Go open this port on your firewall and forward it to this LAN IP” but for the customers we’re going after, we’ll have lost their interest after hearing “port” and “firewall.”
Doing things this way allows us to provide updates to the underlying OS directly from TrueNAS (iX). We will provide a custom ISO that connects servers to our HexOS Command Deck and ensure that persists through OS updates from TrueNAS directly. We do intend to gatekeep the update process in our UI to give us a chance to test new releases from TrueNAS before allowing our community to update en masse, but if you wanted to be brave, you could drop to the SCALE webUI and update directly as it would pull from the same source. More than likely everything will continue to work in the HexOS UI, but “Ye be warned…”
The TrueNAS SCALE UI is always available locally.
We’re not stepping in the data path directly, just management, so your data and privacy stays local to you. In addition, if the Internet goes down, all your apps and data are still available to users on the LAN. And as a benefit to us, management traffic is incredibly lightweight compared to data, making this very scalable in our infrastructure.
We’re also not ruling out providing some type of local UI in the future, though it would be severely gimped compared to anything we build on the Command Deck. Basic “replace failed drives, stop/start apps and vms, etc.” only. And it would only be available after the initial configuration was complete (likely as a Docker container). Further still, it is not an objective for us prior to 1.0.
And while I completely understand the skepticism of vendor lock-in, we have none. Users always can ditch HexOS for native TrueNAS SCALE. It is on-us to keep delivering enough value to keep our users on our platform, because there is nothing we’re doing to force them to stay, even with a hosted UI/UX for management.
I actually go into the story behind this even further in the video with Robbie, so I hope you’ll check it out.
Edit: Should mention that the Q&A isn’t posted yet. That should happen soon (this week).
