FreeBSD fans rally round zVault upstart

TrueNAS is alive and well, but iXsystems has shifted its focus to the Linux-based SCALE edition. For the FreeBSD faithful left clinging to CORE, a new contender is limbering up: zVault.

The zVault project is a new all-FOSS OS for network-attached storage (NAS) servers, based on FreeBSD 13.3. The project has just unleashed its second preview release, which resolves some intellectual property issues that sidelined the first preview. For now, this is a preview, and we definitely do not recommend storing any important data on it. It's an encouraging sign, though.

As we covered last March, iXsystems has put its FreeBSD-based NAS OS, TrueNAS CORE, into maintenance mode. Its successor offering is TrueNAS SCALE, which, instead of FreeBSD, uses Debian Linux as its underlying OS. The company is keen to emphasize that "No one is being 'marooned' by Debian focus," as it told The Register sister site Blocks & Files. Indeed, thanks to the magic of ZFS boot environments - complete, bootable OS snapshots - it's even possible to do an in-place migration from the FreeBSD version to the new Linux version.

But if you're not interested in running Docker containers on your storage server, or you don't want to integrate your storage with your Kubernetes clusters, there's good news: zVault has picked up the final FreeBSD version of TrueNAS CORE.

zVault issued a first preview release in late February, but Kris Moore of iXsystems opened an issue with that release, claiming that it contained iXsystems' intellectual property, and the zVault project withdrew the ISO in response. Now, the zVault team is working on disentangling the last traces of iXsystems and removing all remaining proprietary files to produce an all-FOSS version.

FreeBSD blogger Vermaden has posted an update expressing the sentiments of some FreeBSD folk towards iXsystems' move: "TrueNAS CORE is Dead - Long Live zVault." It's an update to their post from last year titled "TrueNAS CORE versus TrueNAS SCALE." It includes a screengrab of a list of over 50 files in the first release that referenced the TrueNAS Enterprise License Agreement.

The zVault project has a relatively modest roadmap on its homepage. Step 1: Get something working out the door. Step 2: Publish a stable release. Step 3 is a version 13.5 update. Only then comes Step 4, which is to rebase the OS on the current FreeBSD 14.

In the meantime, there is also XigmaNAS, which continues from an older version of FreeNAS predating iXsystems' involvement, without all the modernization work that iXsystems put into it. It's rather more complicated to deploy than TrueNAS CORE, and its web UI is significantly less polished, but it's there, it works, and it gets updates. ®