What do you mean by pre-ZFS? NanoBSD for the boot volume? Yes, BTDT. But as far as I know FreeNAS has always used ZFS for the storage pool(s).
I have been running it since FreeNAS 8, deployed every application I could in “experimental” VNET jails, VMs were Virtualbox based at the time so I wasn’t interested.
After 9.x FreeNAS Corral happened and I must say that my experience was nowhere near as bad as it seems to have been for some or even the majority of folks. All in all even Corral was rather smooth sailing. Lacking jails I reworked all my services into dedicated VMs, based on FreeBSD of course, and e.g. ran a DHCP server VM with half a gig of memory. Bridged networking worked great as is still the case with TN CORE.
TN CE has a long way to go - not in terms of features, but in terms of robust bridged networking, service isolation, etc. This is of course mainly due to Docker’s brain dead networking implementation. I am curious how you intend to solve that.
I do not “hate” Linux. But for anything that can run smoothly on FreeBSD, like e.g. Nextcloud or more or less any “LAMP” application, I absolutely prefer the clean and flexible implementation of jails over any other container technology.
Also I do not personally run VMs on CE. It is my main platform for anything that by the decision of the project in question is strictly Docker based. I could use a plain Linux system with e.g. Dockge but if I run TrueNAS I gain snaphots and replication to my other TrueNAS systems without rolling my own version of all of that. Plus SNMP etc.
If I may add a final word of criticism or suggestions for improvement: I have a career in IT now lasting almost 4 decades. My primary concerns with the direction of TrueNAS at the moment are:
- bring back LLDP
- improve SNMP
- improve reporting via what in CORE used to be graphite protocol - no idea (yet) what CE uses
- if you really terminate TrueCommand - offer an on-premises alternative
Monitoring is probably the single most important thing in an enterprise context. SNMP no matter how ancient and old fashioned it is, is ubiquitous. Same for LLDP. The removal of the latter really shocked me. Have you folks ever run a data centre?
Kind regards,
Patrick