This week, we have the release of the iXsystems TrueCommand 2.0. For those who missed our original iXsystems TrueCommand release coverage in 2019, this is the “single pane of glass” management interface for iXsystems products such as TrueNAS Core, Enterprise, and Scale. The new 2.0 version adds a few new features and under-the-hood improvements.
iXsystems TrueCommand 2.0 Released
With the new TrueCommand 2.0 version, the older PostgreSQL database was replaced by the time-series InfluxDB. With this change, the solution can now monitor metrics at 30x the speed of previous generations (now at per second.)
Another big feature is that the new solution has a new Storage Navigator where one can create and manage datasets, volumes, and iSCSI LUNs. TrueCommand is going to be the interface where anyone managing more than one TrueNAS system will eventually go to do primary management. The company is adding features, but that is the clear direction and is important for the next feature.
TrueCommand 2.0 added support for the TrueNAS Scale Cluster UI. At STH, we see the clear vision that TrueNAS Scale is a major initiative. TrueCommand 2.0 adding management features here is iXsystem’s way to offer something akin (albeit very different in implementation) to VMware vCenter or even Proxmox VE’s multi-system WebGUI. This ability to control clusters is important if one wants to offer scale-out clustered storage and hyper-converged nodes.
As iXsystems continues to develop TrueCommand, this can eventually be the interface to manage both the scale-out hyper-converged nodes running clustered storage and workloads while at the same time offering the ability to manage ZFS storage as well.
Final Words
TrueCommand is “free” up to 30 drives and then has a fairly reasonable subscription after that. To us, the theme of this announcement is that iXsystems is continuing a path into enabling many nodes rather than 1-2 node FreeNAS systems of years ago. It seems like there is still work to be done. Still, watching this solution grow over time is great to see as if iXsystems kept FreeNAS constrained to 1-2 node installations, other solutions would be far ahead at this point. Instead, the company is driving a vision for the future which is great to see.
Quoting the STH article: “TrueCommand is “free” up to 30 drives and then has a fairly reasonable subscription after that.”
Follow the link the the STH article to the STH article on the release of this product and you learn that you will need yet another server (baremetal or VM) to run this software. That’s from the graphic at the top of the article.
So let’s be truthful here STH. “free” isn’t exactly FREE in this case.
Otherwise, nice work as usual.
Uh, of course it does sleepy. Where else would you run it? I don’t get the truthful comment? If you download Docker onto a server, 7zip onto your Windows desktop, and you run the application the license to Docker and 7zip is free. The resources to run the software are not.
Or are you just heavy trolling?
Thanks for the coverage, Cliff & STH Team! Just one clarification, TrueCommand is free for up to 50 drives under management.