However, my point is that some Enterprise releases, like RedHat, will not be back porting everything. This means new drivers might not make it to RHEL until you upgrade. Even somethings will get dropped, (like BTRFS was from RHEL7), because of it’s reliance on kernel updates to get bug fixes and new features.
That last is one reason why I think some drivers and file systems should be developed outside of the kernel source tree. It may be a pain for these to support multiple kernels, but it also means that these drivers and file systems actually get fixed across multiple kernels, without relying on someone else to do the back porting. In this case, I mean drivers and file systems under active development, like nVIDIA and OpenZFS.
Enterprises have always operated 6-12 months behind Community releases and generally do upgrade every 1-3 years based on need. They get professional advice and assistance from our Support team. It’s a very different set of requirements and experience from Community.
It seems somewhat ironic that iX have made CORE the closest thing to a LTS by not developing it anymore but still maintaining security fixes for now. That makes it a very attractive proposition for some people.
Does iX know and if so are we allowed to know when CORE with officially go EOL? I mean an actual date in the diary?
If they they are 6-12 months behind, then per definition they would also need to update every 6-12 months. Which seems unlikely and the 1-3 years that you also mention seems more realistic. How do you then reconcile that with ”We are generally backporting at least 1 version” (with reference to security issues)? With 6 month release schedules, towards enterprise you would need to actively maintain >5 versions in reality based on what you said.
Is the reality rather that the majority of ”enterprise”, or shall we call them paying customers, are still on mostly old versions, including Core? And you deal with them on case by case basis bilaterally.
Correction… the new customers start using a release 6 months behind and then update every 1-3 years (typical). You can see this is the “mission critical” row of the Software Status page.
Agreed its like an LTS release. We don’t have an official EOL date. There are still about 35% of users on 13.0.x and a higher % of Enterprise users. We no longer ship new systems with 13.0, but we are committed to the success of the existing customers. We’d also like to make sure CORE users have a reliably good experience when upgrading to Community Edition.
13.0-U6.7 is a solid and very reliable release with large amounts of testing and validation.
So Kris mentioned on the most recent T3 Tech Talk that when a version reaches its .2 release thats when iX officially stop supporting the previous version.
24.10.2 was released in Jan 25
25.10.2 is expected around Jan 26
So I guess if I purchased a TN appliance between let’s say between Feb 25 - Dec 25 it would ship with 24.10.2 (or whatever the latest version of 24.10 is at the time)?
Now if I was ‘lucky’ enough to make my purchase in Feb 25 I would get almost a whole year before I would be forced to upgrade or take the risk of running an unsupported version. But if I was unfortunate enough to purchase in Dec 25 I would get about a month before I was in that situation?
I appreciate no matter what the cadence was you would always have situations like this however the faster the cadence the more common they become.
Historically I believe TrueNAS used to have an ‘Enterprise’ version and that was much more conservative with its updates. Would you ever think about doing that again and dare I say allow the community to use it?
QNAP most certainly isn’t considered to be enterprise anything, at the very least due to their poor security record. However, the hardware’s not bad and runs TrueNAS SCALE very nicely, making that combination a great consumer-level choice.
You are making an invalid assumption. We support Enterprise customers on their release and don’t force them to update to an immature release. We can do private manual or released hot fixes as needed. They are never running an “unsupported version”, but we may recommend an update to a more recent mature version.
Enterprise upgrades are more reliable because they are known hardware configurations and can be pre-tested as an appliance.
