TrueNAS is a LICENSE licensed CATEGORY written in LANG. - Website - Source - Documentation - AlternativeTo > QUOTE # Notability [TrueNAS CORE](https://www.truenas.com/truenas-core/) (formerly "FreeNAS") is a fully open source (with paid support options) file and application server [OS](https://github.com/truenas/os) based on [[FreeBSD]]. # Philosophy ## Cost TrueNAS is free and open source, with most tooling and application code available on [Github](https://github.com/truenas). There are enterprise support options, which are unfortunately in the "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" category. Also, enterprise-tier support requires purchasing hardware supplied by their [parent company](https://www.ixsystems.com/). In all fairness, the hardware they sell looks pretty good. # OS Support # Features ## TrueNAS Core Based on [[FreeBSD]]. ### Virtualization While BSD supports Jails having a full Virtualization system built into the server software is important. TrueNAS supports generic VM creation: - https://www.truenas.com/docs/core/coretutorials/jailspluginsvms/virtualmachines/creatingbasicvm/ TrueNAS CORE also supports Jail creation and management in the UI, although I'm not sure this is particularly useful. Would need to see if there is a good system for automatable Jail "appliances" available or similar. ### Storage TrueNAS is primarily built around [[OpenZFS]] for storage and management. This is why there is more manual effort with management. But it should also be very powerful and flexible. One of the downsides of ZFS is that it expects storage pools to be relatively fixed. This is the typical professional use case. But means if you are looking to upgrade, you will essentially need to build a whole new system and move the data over and then retire the old one. There is a [pull request](https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/12225) to allow incremental additions to arrays that has been open for around 8 months (at the time of this writing in Feb 2022). Even once it is merged, it could take months or years to make it into the FreeNAS UI. A workaround for this instead of adding more disks, just get larger disks. Then you pull the old smaller disk and replace it with a larger one. Then allow it to rebuild the array with the new disk. Once that is complete, then pull the next disk and repeat until your whole array has been upgraded. This is one of NFS's superpowers, but performance will be degraded while this is happening, and depending how much data there is it could take a while. ## TrueNAS Scale [TrueNAS SCALE](https://www.truenas.com/truenas-scale/) is pretty much the same UI and userspace as TrueNAS CORE except based on Debian [[Linux]]. It differs primarily in how it does virtualization. This virtualization strategy makes running containers cheaper and easier. ### Virtualization TrueNAS SCALE uses k3s (supposedly) and containers are run as unprivilleged users. People keep saying that since SCALE also supports Docker natively, and that it is the obvious choice if you're going to use containers. I'm not in a hurry to validate this right now. Supports PCI passthrough just like CORE. ### Storage Same as TrueNAS CORE. # Tips # References