14 DAY TRIAL // The awesome FreeNAS development team was proud to announce on the last day of August 2016 the release and immediate availability for download of the Beta milestone of their upcoming FreeNAS 10 open-source storage operating system.
Approximately one year has passed since the debut of the Alpha version of FreeNAS 10, but the development team has been pretty busy during all this time fixing as many reported issues as possible. Therefore, they are happy to announce that FreeNAS 10 Beta is here to address a total of 830 reported bugs.
However, that's not all they've been doing, as this Beta release adds many new technologies to the upcoming FreeNAS 10 network-attached storage solution based on the newest FreeBSD 10.3 distribution, such as better support for the ZFS file system, Docker container support, which still needs a lot of work to become production-ready.
There are also many GUI changes since the Alpha release, such as support for sidebar notifications, file selector widgets, the ability to configure the dashboard, full support for creating and manipulating ZFS snapshots and datasets, as well as zvols in the Storage UI, along with support for importing and exporting ZFS filesystems.
FreeNAS 10 Beta also comes with support for the Active Directory and FreeIPA directory services, many improvements to the backup and replication functionality, command-line enhancements, a new ReST API for controlling middleware, as well as better support for virtual machines.
Upgrades from FreeNAS 9.x are not supported in the Beta
FreeNAS 10 Beta has numerous other minor improvements that make it the best open-source network-attached storage solution available on the market, so you'll need to sign up on the project's forum to read the full release notes if you're curious to know what exactly has been changed or added.
"All that said, we think the sheer quantity of enhancements and new technologies in 10-BETA have been worth the wait, and we hope you will dedicate at least some of your valuable time to evaluating it and sending us bug reports on the issues you find as we work our way towards the next public release," reads the forum announcement.
In the meantime, you can download the FreeNAS 10 Beta ISO images right now via our website, but please try to keep in mind not to use the OS for production work, as well as that you can only interact with it using the Google Chrome web browser. Also, upgrades from FreeNAS 9.x are not supported during the Beta stages of development.