04
May
2011
FreeNAS™ 8.1 Roadmap
James T. Nixon III Wednesday, 04 May 2011
The Future of FreeNAS
Hey all,
In the last 48 hours FreeNAS™ was downloaded ~43,000 times. That is like 890 downloads an hour, every hour. With stats like that it is no wonder how we've gotten so much feedback from the community!
According to "the cloud" the community needs UPnP, iTunes, DAAP, RSYNC, and Bit Torrent support before they can use FreeNAS™ 8. This is on our Roadmap for 8.1...
FreeNAS™ in the Cloud
The FreeNAS Community Facebook currently has 254 fans, 583 page views, and the @FreeNASTeam Twitter account has 203 followers! We're doing the best we can to address the feedback and requests of the community.
The Road to 8.1
- Migration utility from .7 to 8.x
- Translations
- SMART monitoring
- more detailed system info
- UPS management
- rsync config GUI
- cron mangement GUI
- Error reporting/user feedback
- Encryption
- Network bandwidth reporting
- Webserver
- 3rd party plug-ins system (modified PBI's from PC-BSD)
- Unison config (using plug-in system?)
- Mount management GUI
- Home user features once plug-in system is working
- BitTorrent
- UPnP/DAAP/DLNA
Feel free to chime-in with your opinion on what should make it on the roadmap.
Comments (97)
You/We will have one hot product with the implementation of this roadmap! I eagerly await FreeNAS 8.1!
Just tested 8, runs nicely! Also looking forward to the things on the list for 8.1. Any idea what the timeframe for 8.1 will be?
I would like Bacula Storage and Nagios
This road map is great, though timeframe is important.
I think its important to maintain read functionality for other filesystems to make it easier to import data from misc disks. Without read/mount capability, copying data from large drives across the network to load up our NAS's could take a lot longer. At least NTFS, Ext3/4, ???
Thanks for the great job on Version 8!
Well. I can't live without VBox or VWare.
I appreciate all the work your team has put into this. This is looking sharp!
So far I've been wrestling with FTP on 8.0. (but most likely b/c I've not used FTP in ages. I was going to use FTP as a Quixporer replacement. Are you planning on including a File Manager of sorts in future releases?
Keep up the good work!
Excellent product! Love it! How about some really needed performance improvement with NFS mounts for VMware NFS datastores.
I also second Bacula built in. Many people not only use their SAN/NAS for media, files, etc., but for a central repository for backups. A built in Bacula would make that very easy to manage.
I also second a timeline. I feel that stuffing many features into one release could delay that release, or make it take very long. Sometimes, splitting it up can make all the difference, and I doubt many people would complain.
It's a great look as to what's to come and I'm also loving the new website design. A fresh look for a new start for FreeNAS! :)
One option that I currently rely on with FreeNAS 0.7 is the ability to setup wifi from the GUI.
My current card shows up as ath0, however there are not wifi options available. It can be done via ssh using ifconfig and an Ethernet connection, although it would be nice to have this built in. Is there a plan to add support for wifi cards in the future?
Thanks...keep up the good work!
Also, I just thought, which goes hand in hand with what I said about splitting up the amount of features in each release, to be able to keep a quicker release schedule, is maybe make a poll, where the top X features become part of the next release. That way, the community feels part of the development process too and there isn't too many features going into the release.
Or maybe I'm just talking too much? XD
CUPS as one of the first plug ins please!
Also please fix AFP so that a file share can be mapped to a folder on a drive. I do not want all my users to see everything on the NAS but in some instances just the contents of a folder (I.E. Music Folder
A email server wood be nice
Tanks ;)
I can wait a little while longer to upgrade to 8 if it would mean getting Unison again.
Soooo sexy.... 8.1 is making me horny...
I do have a couple of deployments held up because 8.0 lacks an rsync GUI: most of my customers replicate their files daily to a remote machine, and sometimes it's not feasible to have a second FreeNAS server on the remote site, for ZFS replication (and I haven't seen enough information about its reliability and resume capability on WAN links, anyway).
Rsync, on the other hand, is ubiquitous - there are versions for all major platforms, making it an ideal backup solution.
SMART monitoring would be nice, but in my experience it seldom predicts faults accurately, anyway; UPS support would be OK, even though the developers of ZFS insist you can't corrupt data due to power loss... who knows?
Be that as it may, I'm very happy with the direction FreeNAS 8.0 is taking - congratulations, and keep up the great work!
Regarding corruption due to power loss - have you ever seen what happens to delicate hardware when it unexpectedly loses power?
I've seen an entire server room with over 1000 servers lose power (very unexpectedly, due to the catastrophic failure of a Power Distribution Unit when the backup PDU was being serviced) and when power was restored several dozen hard drives in various servers had failed.
The ZFS developers may insist data corruption is impossible, and they may be right, but they're not taking hardware failure into consideration - just imagine if you had more drives malfunction after a power failure than the redundancy in your ZFS pool can sustain. You'll have lost all your data, but at least it won't have been corrupted. :)
Graceful server shut down thanks to a UPS is still an essential requirement, and not just local UPS monitoring but also network (NUT) monitoring of UPS, as multiple servers will most likely be running off the same physical UPS.
Deduplication and NFSv4
I like your current listing of items. The order sounds fair although I would like UPS to be completed as soon as possible. No one likes to let thier system just drop dead, even if it doesn't lose any data. It's not good practice.
Whether there's built in support for UPS or not, you can still use a UPS.
Well yes of course you can, but that's largely missing the point which is that the server must still be able to shut itself down automatically when the UPS battery can no long sustain the server.
Running the server on a UPS without monitoring will only mean it can survive brown outs but it will still fail, perhaps catastrophically, if the power is removed without warning, and in a properly managed environment this possibility is simply unacceptable.
Also please implement NUT (Network UPS Tool) for network UPS monitoring in the GUI as well as locally/directly connected UPS support! :)
It's not much harder to monitor a network UPS than it is a local UPS. You can hack FreeNAS 0.7.2 to monitor a network UPS with some simple behind-the-scenes config changes (three sed's in post-init) even though the GUI is technically only capable of monitoring a local UPS.
Internet radio repeater for the home or corporate network
How about an option to email the config file anytime it is changed.
Good Job, Thanhs a lot for tour job. I tested Freenas 0.8 but in my case there is the lack of the WebServer because I need to use freenas as a nas server and lamp server with joomla so I will do it with the next release. Something important in Freenas 0.8, the GUI don't work with IE9.
Tanks ;)
8.0 looks good, interface is a bit tricky at times - just too many ways to do the same thing.
Also I wouldnt mind seeing the full install option back again :)
Cheers
What about SabNzbd+?
+++
I would also like to see SABnzbd+ native to FreeNAS. What I do foresee is more community involvement once the plugin architecture is finally fleshed out in FreeNAS 8.1. We will probably see many enthusiasts creating plugings like Transmission and SABnzbd+ and [hopefully] Bacula to supplement the great FreeNAS software.
This is great because it helps offload work off of the development of FreeNAS, where they can focus more on improving the core features and security, and the people can help add more features themselves. That also helps shave off some overhead off of FreeNAS, with some features being optional, if you do not have a need for it.
I also hope the plugin architecture is well documented and has easy upkeep, that way I can invest some time in creating plugins too. :)
Support for formatting Advanced format disks using 4K sectors. And then support for packages so we can add all the home user software
afaik this is done automagically at the backend..
Not from my experience. Using WD20EARS drives creating a new NFS volume via the gui results in 512 byte sectors. Having a checkbox like .7 would be nice.
Can you integrate a "RSync over SSH" system? For replicating on another Freenas sever over Internet, this could be nice (and secure)...
nice job, we're all waiting for 8.1
the ability to add disks to an existing volume via GUI will be helpfull for home or small installations.
disk replacement may require manual operations, like disk detachement that's not supported via GUI.
also resilvering status should be displayed in GUI.
thanks
Can you add support for Hyper-v SCSI controller ?
PLEASE !!
I would second the idea of prioritizing the most wanted features via a poll or similar. At this stage I think it wouldn't harm to schedule a minor release 8.0.1 to include such features, enabling people to migrate.
In my case, I can't live without ssh~rsync and cron, so I'll have to keep my 0.7.2 Sabanda until included for production use.
Best regards
First things first, congratulations for this release and the long hard work done for us.
As UPS and others are already on roadmap, I'll vote for
* replication (ala DRBD under linux) or any distributed/parallel storage solution,
* HA/failover
* deduplication
Once again, thank yall very much for this nice peace of software
Bests for the 8.x series
You should also include rdiff-backup ( http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/). From their website:
What is it?
rdiff-backup backs up one directory to another, possibly over a network. The target directory ends up a copy of the source directory, but extra reverse diffs are stored in a special subdirectory of that target directory, so you can still recover files lost some time ago. The idea is to combine the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup. rdiff-backup also preserves subdirectories, hard links, dev files, permissions, uid/gid ownership, modification times, extended attributes, acls, and resource forks. Also, rdiff-backup can operate in a bandwidth efficient manner over a pipe, like rsync. Thus you can use rdiff-backup and ssh to securely back a hard drive up to a remote location, and only the differences will be transmitted. Finally, rdiff-backup is easy to use and settings have sensical defaults.
I had never heard about it before, but it sounds great! Cast another vote for rdiff-backup
I'd vote for not crashing after almost exactly 24h.
Congratulations on the release, and thank you for the great job! I agree with the previous poster that block-level replication (aka DRBD), and HA functionality (failover) are among the features most important for the enterprise use, and should be included in the new releases sooner, rather than later.
Very Good, the right way to replace my XServe ...
I love this software, I just can not get iSCSI to work. There is a process that errors out every time I try to add a target. I followed the instructions on the site for creating iSCSI, but it errors out at the end when I try to enable the process. Is there a way to fix this and make an iSCSI wizard? Until this issue is fixed, I have to stick with 7.2
Tiered storage systems - moving data, which is not frequently accesses, from faster disks (SSD/SAS) to slow disks (SATA. Also, set a scrubbing service to either offload old data. For example, either move or delete files that are over a week old.
I hope the feature will like FreeNAS 7(at least)
UPS, RSYNC, etc
or OpenMediavault such as volker did
:D
I want to know what will be included in the "Mount management GUI" section under the 8.1 roadmap?
Great job with 8.0 and the new website. Would like to see the webserver in 8.1.
WebDav is very important also.
Would there not be a possibility to include an NZB client in the version 8.1. There are a lot of users out there using NZB servers over Torrents. Well done on an awesome version 8. I have noticed a drastic improvement on the Transfer Rates over regular Gigabit Network Devices.
In order to not use chmod and chown command, it will be nice to see acl control in 8.1.
Replication is great but I would love to have it also locally.
I do a Backup of the Filesystem on a large USB Disk which is connected locally. Currently it needs to connect via SSH - this should be optional.
AFAIK Replications can be performed locally via Rsync
Rsync, Webdav, cron jobs, smart reporting are main features which should be integrated asap.
I use FreeNAS already for years, but can't go to v8 yet when these functions are not available.
This list looks pretty good. My personal priorities are UPS, webserver, & UPnP/DAAP. You guys are doing great work!
All I really need in 8.1 is rsync and cron GUIs. I'm not migrating from 0.7.2 until it's added.
I'd like to see syslog server configuration in GUI as well.
I'd like to see proper iSCSI support for Cluster Shared Volumes (MS Hyper-V Clusters).
8 is nice can't wait for 8.1 as a web developer would like to use the webserver options, as well as the Rsync
Good job for the last release :-)
Freenas do not have differential backup tool
Rdiff-backup is a good tool to make these backups
Wonderful work. As a FreeBSD newbie, i noticed that smartd uses mailx for the optional SMART command options in the GUI. A lot of consumer e-mail servers require a valid/from sender header for e-mail to work which(roadrunner, comcast, etc.) does not seem to be supported by mailx properly (-r or -f) but can be supported by nail. Since I presume most folks will be operating freeNAS headless through the http interface, please consider this in your GUI implementation of SMART e-mail notifications.
FreeNAS 8 is really nice. 8.1 sounds like it will be great! Keep up the good work.
Well, of course I'd love to have an integrated firewall and SABnzbd...
Would love to see a FreeSwitch plugin!
I would love to see a newer version of ZFS. I know that BSD is not at version 22, but it would be awesome to have it. De-duplication is the only thing missing at this point.
How about "ATA over Ethernet (AoE)"?
tried to setup v0.8 in virtual box v4.0.6..
RC4 YEAH!
RC5 Not burnable to CD
RELEASE Constant reboot loop
Please fix so .iso is burnable to cd for
install and won't go into reboot loop.
Finally! Great job, I'm trying it in a test environment and for now no issues.
Cannot find the option to enable "beep" at startup/shutdown.
A "little" request: there's a package called "kissdx" that is used to stream media files to my glorious (and old, of course) Kiss dp 500. It's possible to "pack" it for Freenas?
What a wonderful Job!
Really good thing, I've tested FN8 sice beta r5606
I miss a feature to create a NT-Domain, machine accounts in SAMBA would be a great feature, as well as CUPS support
Keep up the good work
logan54
Hi !
FreeNAS 8 looks gret !
I need UPnP, iTunes, and BitTorrent to install FreeNAS 8 but the integration of AirPrint could be great !
Synology and QNAP added it recently ( http://www.synology.com/fre/products/features/airprint.php ; http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=37829#p166447).
Apparently they used CUPS and Gutenprint for the pilots.
I don't know if it is hard to make but it could be
I would like to see system logs (disappeared actually) also php & mysql for intranet use. Also external drive support via GUI for rsync backup.
i would like to pyload, great work!!!
Great work, but obviously in progress.
You'll need a way for users to report bugs - adding tickets on the Trac doesn't work or in the Sourceforge thing...
Since I am a .7 user for about a year now and I have about 7TB of data on my Freenas, the only thing that is keeping from upgrading is the lack of a migration method from
.7 to 8.x . Once such a utility is available, then I will wait no longer, because this new version looks awesome!!!!
Make it include a Umurmur Server and I'll be very happy.
https://code.google.com/p/umurmur/
Googling a little bit I saw that somebody already integrated DLNA server called SERVIIO into FREENAS. There's more information in:
http://forum.serviio.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=692
Unless I'm missing something, a feature which doesn't seem to exist, but would be great is Samba share permissions. It seems to be all or nothing at the moment, either the users have it or they don't. Fine grained per user permission would make FreeNAS closer to perfect.
I would like to see BackupPC support (has built-in de-duplication and compression) along side Bacula. I'm currently running ubuntu as a backup server but been waiting for 0.8 to be more stable and open.
Yet another request (if possible):
a simple file manager, Midnight Commander for example; sometimes I need something more "robust" than the http file manager was in v.07
Thank you!
g.
Allow users to change their passwords via web gui.
Password complexity managment.
Forgoten password managment via email ( ie. send link allowing set new ).
I would really like to see more system information, log files on the web gui and also the Transmission torrent service.
What about the emailed status reports? My business uses these for certain things, but they seem to be missing from 8.0, would definitely like to see them back.
To make the migration to FreeNAS 8 I need rsync, webserver and daap. Transmission/bittorrent would be nice
I think some of the suggestions here are great, but NAS is NAS, and focusing on core storage related functions are more important than Itunes, streaming media, torrent servers, web servers etc. If you want all the features of a multi-function server, offload it to another system and let the NAS handle the storage, and not the game playing.
I could not agree more!
Bells and whistles should come well after the storage foundation has been secured.
After we've *nailed* storage, then we can look at adding extra packages/plugins (a la pfSense).
I say get that ZFS zpool v28 backport going with full and easy control over all the ZFS features in the GUI.
Performance metrics would be nice, but should also be secondary to solidifying/improving storage.
I really enjoy FreeNAS 8 though reading this roadmap makes me believe you are heading back to FreeNAS 7. What's the point of adding BitTorrent as a native software on 8.x? I get that most people use it because I use it too on 7.x but if you're aiming for a stable and more "pro-looking" platform on 8.x by using ZFS you should make all these changes (rsync, unison, bittorrent, nzb, and so on) as third-party optional packages, not something built-in to the system.
For those who want to use these features, they should use the 7.x version.
++, although I'd argue that rsync would fit well into the FreeNAS "core". At least it's directly related to storage (as in moving files onto your storage).
Could you guys please use something other than transmission for the bittorent, I had nothing but issue with it in 0.7x. Please!
Looks good, the only thing I miss from the Roadmap is a timeline. When do you expect FreeNAS 8.1 to be released ?
If the torrent client could work with something like FlexGet for automated torrent downloads (think automated weekly TV Series downloads etc.) that would be great.
I believe FlexGet supports Transmission, and FlexGet is written using Python. There is a port for FreeBSD (py-flexget) but not sure if it's the latest or deprecated/abandoned.
Could we get a time line for 8.1? The only feature I care about that's missing from 8.0 is rsync. I can do without everything else but that and I'm not moving from 0.7.2 until it's available.
REQUEST: Live CD option for FreeNAS 8
FreeNAS 8 -super!
I propose - version 8.xxxx "small" mail server 2-5 users
I'd like an option to have any USB memory key automatically backed up to a configurable location of your choice. My ReadyNAS NV+ (replaced with HP Microserver and FreeNAS) had this - plug the key in, the light stops flashing when it's done.
Great work on 8.0. I've not used it before, but it looks pretty good to me.
Great job!
Request:subversion server & Trac server
I agree with the above comments, Get the core right first. Rsync should definetely be there. More logs, basic firewall, permissions etc and functionality that a enterprise nas would have, not a home nas. Bitorrent, sabnzb clients etc should be available as extras for those that wish to install them, not forced onto those that don't.
- fewer options than freenas 7
- very bad zfs cifs and nfs performance (also in 7, probably because of BSD).
still use freenas 7 and can't find a reason for upgrade, moving to phyton/django was a good option, but the overall package lacks improvement.