At STH, we have been working with FreeNAS for quite some time. This week, FreeNAS 11.1 was released with a few new features. We will get to those features soon however notably this was a big update in terms of hardware support as it is based on FreeBSD 11.1. Newer platforms such as AMD Ryzen (March 2017 launch) and Intel Xeon Scalable (July 2017 launch) are now supported.
The FreeNAS 11.1 Update
With the new FreeBSD 11.1 stable underpinnings, the FreeNAS 11.1 update has as number of drivers and security fixes onboard. We recently used FreeBSD 11.1 for our Exploring the Best ZFS ZIL SLOG SSD with Intel Optane and NAND piece recently. The CPU support updates are joined notably by support for Broadcom’s 9400 series HBA which is interesting with its tri-mode support (SATA, SAS, and NVMe.) There are also incremental OpenZFS improvements that have made their way into the new version along with an updated GUI.
In terms of new features, FreeNAS 11.1 now has a cloud sync feature that can help manage data both in the FreeNAS NAS but also to a cloud provider such as AWS S3, Azure, GCP and Backblaze B2. The other headline feature is “preliminary” Docker container support based on a RancherOS virtual machine. This is a similar feature that was in the canned FreeNAS Corral that was removed from the stable branch earlier this year. The lack of Docker functionality we know has pushed some users to ZFS on Linux solutions so it is good to see FreeNAS getting back in the game. We also showed off Rancher as one of our favorite container orchestration solutions in our Docker Swarm Management: A Quick Overview of Rancher, Portainer and Shipyard.
You can read the full announcement here.
How to get FreeNAS 11.1
If you have an existing install, you can use the FreeNAS updater. If you are doing a clean install, you can download the new FreeNAS 11.1 release here.
