Migration CORE->SCALE: General Question

TrueNAS General
1

Hi folks
I’m running TrueNAS/FreeNAS for more than 10 years now and it seems that the FreeBSD based CORE seems to reach eol in the near future :smiling_face_with_tear:
My use case is mostly private for a single user, I’m running a 3 drives ZFS pool on a quite old machine und I’m using this for timemachine backups, archiving some music, photos, movies and other private stuff and a nextcloud instance running in a jail based on GitHub - samuel-emrys-blogs/freebsd-nextcloud-setup-hardened: How to install Nextcloud on FreeNAS in an iocage jail with hardened security

So my questions are

  • Can I just use the same ZFS pool on SCALE without copying the data and rebuilding the pool? I have a backup, but I don’t want to loose my ZFS snapshot history.
  • I assume that jails are not supported anymore, and the new way is to use a kind of containers. Is this docker or podman based?
  • Is there a guide or other documentation for migrating jails to the new world?
  • Is there an official way to use nextcloud on TrueNAS Scale?
  • My current server is about 15 years old, it has 12GB ram and cpu info from boot says
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU         750  @ 2.67GHz (2660.00-MHz K8-class CPU)

and

  Features2=0x98e3fd<SSE3,DTES64,MON,DS_CPL,VMX,SMX,EST,TM2,SSSE3,CX16,xTPR,PDCM,SSE4.1,SSE4.2,POPCNT>
  AMD Features=0x28100800<SYSCALL,NX,RDTSCP,LM>
  AMD Features2=0x1<LAHF>

Is this still sufficient? Can I use docker with this CPU or should I think about buying new hardware?

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Hi, i was wondering about the same idea… But for the moment say that core is eol is a bit much. I think we can stay good for at least another year… Hope more!

1: assuming that have a backup is always better, you can import pool from core to scale
2: jail are not supported, but you can always install the same app in a docker restoring backup as supported by the specific app
3: is related to the specific app of the jail, i dont think exist something “generic”
4: dont know but for sure, maybe in nextcloud doc
5: i think u will need at least a RAM upgrade, 12 are a bit low for core too

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This is my guide to the jails system on scale

Personally, I migrated my services into docker compose in a vm on core. Then that vm migrated easily to scale.

Then I migrated those docker compose stacks to a sandbox/jail

Scale can mount your pool. And the migration is pretty good.

In my experience scale has less ram needs than core.

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4

Based on my experience changing from CORE to SCALE:

  1. Your pools should be fine, and show up in SCALE. No need to copy/rebuild.
  2. As I see it, there are two things in SCALE that replace jails/plugins.
    a) As others have noted, there is a Sandbox/Jailmaker solution. It’s very much a roll-your-own thing. You’ll find instructions for setting up a Jailmaker jail, but then you’re on your own, depending on what you want to put in it. Not being a video learner, I suggest you start here. That will get you started, then link you to the jailmaker github page for further info.
    b) Apps. This is where you can set up prepackaged Apps with their options, in some kind of container/pod. To me, the App system is kind of a minefield, lots of stuff out there but documentation is poor to nonexistent. I’ve gotten what I need to work eventually, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
  3. You can’t migrate jails to SCALE, just set up new stuff to replace them as noted above.
  4. There are at least two NextCloud Apps. One is in the TrueNAS catalog and one in the Truecharts catalog, premium train.
  5. I saw somewhere that SCALE is less demanding of hardware than CORE, but maybe others can comment on suitability of your hardware.
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5

Thanks for the answers so far.
I can remember that I could not use bhyve on my current machine some years ago, due to missing cpu features but I cannot remember any details .

7

Migrated my test CORE system to Scale today.
Did it through the GUI and it took about 30 minutes with a few reboots on its own.
Everything that could migrate, did without any shell work.
Network, which I have a lagg setup migrated fine. Pools showed up and my rsync from another truenas Core instance is still connected and runs.
TrueCommand didnt even notice the change other than displaying the new OS.
Ill wait on apps as there seems to be some changes on the horizon but as a NAS the migration went perfect!

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