Migrate from FreeNAS-11.3-U5 to TrueNAS Scale - Encrypted volumes + VMs

TrueNAS General
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1

Hi all,
I’m using Freenas since a few years, and I love it. My boot disk is failing, so instead of just replacing it, I wanted to migrate to TrueNas Scale.
I have a few encrypted volumes in raid 1, with SMB shares, and also two VMs running on these encrypted volumes. These VM use NFS to access data stored in the volumes.
As I’m running 11.3-U5, what is the best option to migrate to scale?

  • Do I plug a new boot disk, install Scale and reimport my encrypted volumes? I suppose I’ll have to recreate users, SMB and NFS shares, but what about my VMs?
  • Do I try updating to Truenas Core then to scale? (I have no proposal to migrate to core in the update menu).
    Thanks for your help!
    Regards,
    Mat
2

Before you attempt to migrate, make sure your volumes don’t use legacy encryption (geli) If you do you have to remove the encryption because it’s no longer supported.

The recommended path would be from freenas to truenas core then to scale.
Installing fresh and importing your pools and vms will most likely fail because of the encryption and your vms need to be migrated from bhye to the vm backend in scale.

Edit:
Here’s a guide on how to remove geli encryption from the old forum:

3

Thanks LarsR
Just cheched, and bingo, it’s geli :weary:
So that mean I need to follow the procedure you sent, then re-encrypt… I have to try this in a VM to be sure if what I’m doing…
Is it Core or Scale that no not support Geli?

4

I believe it’s both, but im not certain as i do not use encryption myself.

5

OK, so for the moment, I’ll just dd my old disk to a new one, then I’ll see if I migrate or stay while I rebuild my NAS is a few years.

6

CORE does support GELI - it’s FreeBSD, so why wouldn’t it?

SCALE/CE is based on Linux. Linux doesn’t have GELI. Or GEOM in general - these are FreeBSD features.

7

OK, so that means I can update to Core, and still use my Geli encrypted disks and bhyve VMs.
So I install Core to my new boot disk, then reimport a backup and everything should work. Can I revert back to my old Freenas boot disk if any problem occurs, I mean, will Core modify my volumes in anyway that will be incompatible with a rollback to Freenas?

8

As long as you don’t “upgrade” your pools, which the GUI seems to nag users to do for some reason.

9

OK, I’ve done some tests in a VM. Installed Freenas 11-3U5 with geli encrypted disks. New install of Core, then rollback, everything is OK :slight_smile:
What I’m not sure, is if it is worth upgrading to Core…

10

Even on CORE we’ve deprecated GELI encryption support for some time now. And the fact that CORE has been supplanted by SCALE / Community Edition means if you are going to make a major jump, you may as well move to the current software in the process. 13.3 is already pretty long in the tooth.

11

I know it’s quite outdated, but I’ll wait when I build by next NAS. The oldest parts are 5yo, so maybe in 1-2 years.
I don’t need any Scale functionalities. I tried the docker integration (I’m using encrypted disks) and I don’t like it, I prefer having a Portainer interface, so I’ll either continue with a VM running docker-compose, or migrate these containers to a VM on my Proxmox server.

12

FWIW, Portainer is available as an app for TrueNAS Scale/CE.

If I were you i’d upgrade stepwise up the stack to TrueNAS CORE 13.

Then re-evaluate.

13

Seconded. A Linux VM on CORE with Portainer might fit the requirements nicely. Access to NAS files is of course not quite as simple as with any native container runtime be it jails, LXC or Docker.

1 Like
14

OK, I’ll give it a try. If I remember last time I tried, I was having issue where the docker-compose named volumes were stored. But I’ll give it another try.