Hello everybody,
I’m a long-time user, since Freenas 7.x, but not a professionnal. My system is CORE-based.
I read that CORE is based on Unix and SCALE on Linux. My usage is only storage and access via SMB shares.
Must I have to upgrade to SCALE ? It seems there is not really upgrades for CORE…
I’m a little bit confused, what need I do ? And why there is CORE 13.3 and CORE 13.0 at the same time ?
Thank you for helping me to understand !
Core 13.0 is the base for the enterprise version. Core 13.3 was released for the community so that people could update their jails and some fixes with bhyve for vms. Core is now in kind of a long term support status, it’s still usable but won’t get any updates anymore (apart from security and maybe minor bug fixes).
Scale is the version that’s in active development and get’s new features like recently zfs expansion, which is not available on core and propably never will be. Scale get’s 2 major releases a year, one in april, one in october with minor point releases in-between.
If all you need is SMB access there’s no need to update to scale any time soon, but some day you might have to migrate to scale if iX decides that core won’t get any more security fixes. Or you want to start to play around with apps or want a zfs feature that’s only available on scale.
The choice is yours.
Wow I couldn’t have said it better myself. Perhaps we should pin this somewhere 
Thank you for your advices… I don’t know what I’ll do… Maybe stay on CORE for a while…
I’ll try to migrate from CORE to SCALE in a VM to prevent some issues.
If you’re not using jails, smb aux parameters and geli encryption you should be good. If you’re using geli encryption you have to remove it before upgrading, because geli was depreciated with core 12 i believe.
Ah, that’s a good information ! I have an encrypted pool, and on another pool, I’ve an encrypted dataset.
Does it works with encrypted datasets only ?
No geli encryption at all
How to know if it’s geli encryption or something else ? I’ve built this dataset on CORE 13.0, maybe it’s not geli ?
Probably not GELI.
Does it say “Legacy Encryption” on the Pools page?
Not on the encrypted dataset.
But yes on the encrypted pool : I’ll migrate the datas on another pool before.
To be safe, does geli list show anything other than the 2-GiB (or 16-GiB) swap devices?
Yes, only the references to the “old” encrypted pool, and the 2GB swaps.
I think the encrypted dataset use a different way to encrypt data.
Thanks everyone for all your advices ! 
If you are going to virtualise then you need to configure this carefully to avoid data loss. It might therefore be safer to do it on bare metal.
Once you have migrated your encrypted pool, you might be better to take out your core system drive and replace it with a new empty drive to install Scale on. Then import your configuration file and you should be good to go - but if any reason you have to go back, then you can swap the system drives over and boot into Core again.
I believe he meant to say he’ll setup a vm to simulate the migration process
That’s it !
But i’ll do it later, I’ll wait the last update for Core. Maybe there will be a version 14…
according to iX, there’re no plans for a version 14… so don’t hold your breath…
