If you tried to download the FreeNAS 10 BETA last week from the public site, you would have seen that it went offline. This week, the FreeNAS 10 BETA2 is available for download. The FreeNAS team has been working hard on a major overhaul of the popular NAS OS and we are excited to see that BETA2 is online. There has been major progress in the OS since the last beta.
What’s new with FreeNAS 10 BETA2
We really like where the FreeNAS 10 UI is going. The UI is much more responsive than the FreeNAS 9.10 UI and more modern. Batch jobs also can be submitted and run asynchronously so you do not have to sit and wait for them to complete. With the new BETA2 version we now have features such as AD integration that were missing from the earlier ALPHA and BETA versions.
One of the biggest changes is that the FreeNAS team is actively utilizing bhyve virtualization and Docker containers to bring application hosting to FreeNAS machines. FreeNAS 9 had an extremely limited set of plugins, especially compared to other SOHO/ SMB NAS vendors. What the FreeNAS 10 team is doing bringing the ability to quickly run applications and hosted VMs to the FreeNAS ecosystem, a feature that is sorely needed.
In anticipation of this, we already have a small test system with 16TB of disk and 5x SSDs in our lab ready for the new release (see here.)
Expect to see content on STH as FreeNAS 10 matures. We have a fairly large backlog of content ready for the new release. FreeNAS is extremely popular with STH readers both for their home labs and in work production deployments.
How to get FreeNAS 10 BETA2
You can download the FreeNAS 10 BETA2 here. The download can be found below the latest stable release. Please note: we do not recommend BETA2 for production use. It is a good build to fire up on an older machine or in a VM and test some of the new features. While the FreeBSD underpinnings may be stable, a lot can change with beta versions of software and so we still recommend waiting for a stable release.
