TrueNAS 25.04.2: Fangtooth re-enables “Virtualization” - Blog

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Blog on 25.04.2 is here: TrueNAS 25.04.2: Fangtooth restores Virtualization

Copied here for any questions or clarifications.

TrueNAS “Fangtooth” was successfully released in April as TrueNAS 25.04.0 and updated to 25.04.1 in May. Over 100,000 users have adopted Fangtooth, which is already the most popular version of TrueNAS. Fangtooth marks a significant step forward in unifying TrueNAS CORE and SCALE under the Community Edition banner while improving the growing line of TrueNAS Enterprise appliances. Today, we’re announcing the second major update to Fangtooth: TrueNAS 25.04.2.

The major change to TrueNAS 25.04.2 is the reintroduction of Electric Eel Virtualization (aka “Virtualization Classic”) as an addition to Instances and LXC. Electric Eel Virtualization is more robust and flexible and is now the approach for adding VMs.

TrueNAS 25.04.2 Highlights

TrueNAS 25.04.2 delivers over 100 bug fixes and improvements. Key areas of enhancement for the first update include:

Virtualization: In Fangtooth, the previous Virtualization tab has been re-enabled in addition to the experimental Instances. Existing VMs created under Instances will remain functional, but new VMs can only be created within the Virtualization UI.

Windows VMs with Secure Boot: This updated Virtualization capability enables VMs with Secure Boot and provides a virtual TPM (Trusted Platform Module) device. Users running Windows 11 VMs can now enjoy the tremendous benefits of virtualizing on top of OpenZFS.

Instances: This experimental feature continues to mature with multiple fixes. New LXC containers can still be created and managed, but new VMs cannot be created in the Instances panel.

STIG Support: Defense-level organizations use Secure Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) to lock down their deployments. This update includes Service auditing and Session management. Implementation of STIGs can be provided as part of Enterprise deployment services. It is partially enabled via the System Security widget.

Fast SMB File Copy for macOS: The ZFS Fast File Copy capability has been included for a while. This update contains specific SMB patches that work well with macOS clients. Mac M&E workflows can now be accelerated by up to 10X while saving pool capacity. A special thank you to the Community users who helped identify the macOS problems and helped us validate the solution.

Veeam Fast Cloning for SMB: The ZFS Fast Clone capability can now be used for Veeam deployments with Enterprise appliances. This update contains an SMB share “Purpose” option that includes SMB patches optimized to work with Veeam Data Movers. Capacity requirements can be significantly reduced, and the workflows accelerated.

IP Addressing for Apps: After the App catalogs were changed on June 1st, each App can be assigned to an interface and its associated IP address, providing more power and segmentation when managing complex storage and App systems. This IP addressing capability is available on Electric Eel 24.10.2.3 and all Fangtooth releases.

Active Directory Security Update: On July 8, Microsoft issued a security update for Active Directory Domain Controllers for Windows Server versions prior to 2025. The Microsoft RPC Netlogon protocol improves security by tightening access checks for a set of RPC requests. TrueNAS (and other Samba implementations) running as domain members in these environments can be impacted. The fix for this TrueNAS change has been documented.

Fangtooth Unification Continues

TrueNAS Community Edition combines the capabilities of TrueNAS CORE and SCALE while adding new features previously unavailable in either. TrueNAS 25.04 is now the most used version of TrueNAS in the community. Over 60% of these TrueNAS users are utilizing Docker, ZFS, and traditional storage protocols together, with this number projected to exceed 75% by the end of 2025.

Fangtooth Feature Highlights

In addition to the functionality from both CORE and SCALE, TrueNAS 25.04 introduced a number of new features, including:

Enterprise Extensions

TrueNAS Enterprise appliances now include extended capabilities with 25.04.2, including:

  • GPOS STIG Support with additional logging, auditing and password management
  • RDMA Extensions for iSCSI (iSER) and NFS, improving latency and IOPS by up to 40%
  • iSCSI Block Cloning accelerates VMware clusters and virtualization workloads like VM cloning by 10X
  • Veeam Fast Cloning accelerates SMB file copy workloads and saves capacity
  • Fibre Channel enables SAN attachment of high-performance NVMe storage on TrueNAS F-Series and H-Series
  • NFS Snapshot Directory Access for easier file restoration by end users

TrueNAS Enterprise appliances pre-loaded with TrueNAS 25.04.2 can be ordered today. Contact a TrueNAS product specialist to discuss available options and learn more about these features and other Enterprise benefits, including up to 24×7 support.

When Should I Update?

If you are deploying a new TrueNAS system, we can recommend either Fangtooth 25.04.2 or Electric Eel 24.10.2.3. Always review the Software Status page for current software recommendations based on your profile and use case.

For our TrueCommand users looking to administer Fangtooth systems centrally, please ensure that you upgrade any self-hosted TrueCommand instances to TrueCommand 3.1 before upgrading any connected systems to TrueNAS 25.04. TrueCommand Cloud subscribers will be automatically upgraded, and no interaction is required.

Current TrueNAS 13.x users looking for the new capabilities outlined above can migrate to TrueNAS 25.04, preserving data and essential NAS functionality such as SMB, NFS, and iSCSI. Once migrated, Docker and LXC can be set up to provide third-party application services and import previously configured Virtual Machines to the Virtualization system. TrueNAS 13.0 will still receive critical security and bug-fix updates, and was recently updated to 13.0-U8.

What’s Next: TrueNAS Goldeye

TrueNAS “Goldeye”, the codename for TrueNAS 25.10, is currently in ALPHA and will bring Enterprise-ready virtualization to TrueNAS. Goldeye plans will be shared before BETA, which is scheduled for later in August. For those who can’t wait, the Goldeye source code is available on GitHub, and developers are welcome to join in using the nightly images on a dedicated testing system.

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Based on libvirt which was dropped in 25.04.0, but reinstated in 25.04.2?
:roll_eyes:

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Well, Incus was experiment that for some reasons didnt work out, no big deal.
Maybe Truenas simply feels safer depending on libvirt which is developed by big company RedHat.

If RedHat uses libvirt for their enterprise virtualization then its certainly very capable platform ready for all the enterprise requirements of Truenas.

I am looking forward to future development and wish Truenas team good luck. :+1:
And thanks for this great product that you offer us for free. :pray:

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Ohhh… RedHat. Feels so good depending on them for F/OSS projects:

Not to mention:

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I look forward to “enterprise-ready” VMs. :smiley:

It will be interesting to see how the GoldenEye VM ecosystem will be different from the present one, and how many enterprise customers will start to adopt them. Like “enterprise” apps, I hope that “enterprise” VM support will include good documentation / how-to guides.

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The best place to start is review the 25.4.2 VMs. Tell us what works and what is missing. We’re keen for community contributions on “how-to” and criticisms on “why can’t I do this?”

25.10 is still in progress… we will reveal and document it as it goes through BETA, RC.1 and Release. It all starts this month (August).

The Enterpise version will support HA and specific use-cases. We are not replacing scale-out general virtualization capabilities of VMware, Hyper-V, incus, or Proxmox. TrueNAS focus for Entrprise is being the efficient, low-latency, HA storage platform.

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You do great things, you take risks, and sometimes you need to correct them.

And you learn from them.

Shrug off the hate.

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will be interesting to see how they plan to do VM clustering and failover (at least thats what enterprise VMs means to me), i had assumed the move to incus was to take advantage of common cluster infrastructure for both VMs and Containers it provides

tbh i am unclear why keep incus containers as the docker solution they use now for containers can happily do swarm clustering

i wait to see, for me this is academic interest, as my main cluster is not truenas.

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docker = application containers
jailmaker+nspawn / LXC+incus = system containers

These are not the same. (And incus will be replaced by libvirt for system containers as well.)

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i never said they were the same, i am more than familiar with the differences

the point remains, why bother having two types of VM engines under the hood long term and how will they get to ‘enteprise’ which to me implies true failover clustering and shared storage, and why bother maintaining incus containers if one is not going to use the whole engine

the investment risk here is they ultimately end u supporting, swarm, incus clustering and some other clustering they do with classic vms

will be interesting to see what route they take

if it were me i would keep classic VMs untill incus UI has feature partity and then drop classic

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What two types of VM engines? There was and will be only one VM engine, QEMU/KVM (itself managed by libvirt).
Maybe you mean something different?

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i shoud have more accurately said virtuaization orchestrtaion engines, thanks for calling out my inaccuracy

my meta point is about the investment overhead of maintaining mulitple ways of doing things and what choices they make (like maybe blocking use of incus vm instances) and maintaining their own orchestration (what they do in classic) vs using orchestration available and maintained by a community

the pros/cons are interesting exercise to think about

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Well, Incus will get removed, only libvirt will stay. I think that basically answers it.

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Secure Boot did not work for me until I changed bootloader_ovmf via cli to OVMF_CODE_4M.secboot.fd and replaced the /data/subsystems/vm/nvram/xx_vmname_VARS.fd with /usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_VARS_4M.ms.fd. I did try without replacing the VARS file but then the VM didn’t boot.

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Thanks for the report and the workaround.

Please report a bug and include a debug file. Can you share a NAS-ticket ID.

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Sure thing: NAS-137054

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I havent seen any annoucement that incus is going away long term or that libvirt is the long term approach to managing QEMU/KVM VMs.

Seems like they continue to invest in incus in parallel, that for now VMs wil be classic VMs. With no statement i have been able to find on long term direction.

My assumption from the release notes and the blog is that virtualization tab wil stay as is and at somepoint under the covers libvirt will be swapped for incus in a way that is transparent to us users. Which is the way this should alway have been planned. I would be surprised if that swap out happen in 25.10 or 26.04 - so this is entirely an academic conversaion :slight_smile:

Did i miss some more explcit statement where they said they will never use incus for managing VMs under the covers?

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how about this message from general chat…

kris
2025-07-29 16:59:09 UTC
General |

I'm a bit shocked that wasn't crystal clear. Incus is being removed from the base system. 100% and entirely. Libvirt is the thing that will handle the backend for both VMS and LXC.

But that said, the way that your message across was bewildering, since I don't know how much clearer that could have been. We also won't be talking as much about backend technology in the future, since folks tend to get all wrapped up around the axel anytime we do :wink:

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thanks appreciate that, perfect! it wasnt clear to me from what was written, i am only interested from an academic product management perspective (what i do in my day job), which orchestration engine it is doesn’t bother me :slight_smile:

makes it even more interesting to me what they mean by ‘enterprise VMs’ in 25.10 - can’t wait to see!

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I usually translate “enterprise” as “supports high availability” :smiley:

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