I tried the HexOS Beta. Here's how it went.
Today I wanted to talk about the beta one of HexOS that was recently released or that I was invited to and share some of the progress that they've been making. Now I don't have a script or anything for this but I wanted to walk you through setting up and configuring HexOS on your own machine so you can kind of see where this project is going. And if you weren't familiar with HexOS, HexOS is a new NAS operating system that's coming to help simplify setting up a NAS. Now we have some simplified options already. If you think Synology, that's pretty simple to set up but you have to buy their hardware. And then you think of things like Unraid that's also easy to set up that you can build on top of your own hardware. And then you have things on the opposite end of the spectrum
which is TrueNAS which is a great product, an enterprise storage solution, but can be challenging to set up for those who aren't sure how to configure it. And if you layer on top of their ZFS, configuring ZFS, pools and even user shares, it gets really complicated really quick. Now TrueNAS isn't something that I could give to my brother or give to some of my non-techie friends, sorry brother, non-techie friends, but I would get a lot of calls from them and it's really complicated to set up and tune and get working the way they want. But HexOS is addressing those pain points by helping
you set up your server easily, manage shares, install applications, configure your pools, just like most consumer targeted NAS operating systems. So let's walk through the Beta 1, talk about some of the things it's good at, some of the things that it's not so good at or haven't been completed, and see where the progress is going. And just a reminder, this is a Beta, it's not the final version and they've been pretty clear on what's working in the current Beta and what's to come in the future.
That being said, it is for sale now, which I bought, but really buying it is going to be up to you and whether or not you believe in the future of HexOS and where they're going as a product. So as soon as I got the HexOS beta invite, I scrambled to put something together. I have a ZimaCube Pro that I have for testing. I put in six 8TB drives, put an NVMe drive in there and then it already had an NVMe drive in there along with 64 gigs of RAM and a 12th gen Intel Core i5. It also has dual 2.5 gig
networking and a 10 gig networking port as well. I'm going to use the 10 gig networking just to make sure it all works. The install is pretty straightforward. It's just like TrueNAS. You have to download the image, you flash a USB drive, and then you plug in that USB drive and you boot from it. And when you boot from it, the install is exactly like TrueNAS except for it says HexOS in a couple of places. Once you walk through that, it will reboot, it will come back up, and then you have to go to deck.hexos.com. Once you get there, you'll have to sign in with the account that you were given and then from there you can claim your server. And now we're on the claim server page
right here. You can see it says, "Let's get started. We will guide you through setting up your new server. If you recently installed TrueNAS, it should automatically be detected when this device is on the same network." And you can see right here mine is already being detected. So it sees a new server of 192.168.0.223 and then I can claim the server. So this is very similar to Plex. If you've ever installed that, you install Plex, you sign in to Plex through Plex.tv, and then you can claim your
local server on your local network. So let's claim this server. Next it's asking for the admin password of the HexOS operating system when you set it up. Basically the TrueNAS web admin password. So it says, "Hold on. Just to make sure it's you, please enter the admin password you specified when
installing the server." There is my admin password that I supplied when I installed the server. Now I claim my server and now we're into the wizard of setting it up. So it says, "Take a moment to check that all of your hardware is detected and working." So this is pretty cool. This is the wizard in setting up a server and setting up our pool. Very simplified compared to TrueNAS. So it sees one SSD and eight hard drives. That's interesting because I only have six ICs. So it's detecting two USB drives. So I do have two 64 gig USB drives in there that it's detecting. So it's detecting it
as a hard drive, which is a little bit weird. Hopefully they can separate that out in the future. But yes, this is right. So I see my one, two, three, four, five, six, eight terabyte drives. I do see my two USB drives and then I do see my one terabyte SSD drive or my NVMe drive. It does
see my 12th gen Intel, which it is supported. Applications are supported and says, "You can run a large 'variety'." So typo there. "You can run a large 'cariety' of different apps like media servers and home automation software. What can you expect so I can run many apps simultaneously?" That is
checked. I assume that means I can run demanding apps for rendering, streaming, or media encoding. So I think maybe that means it's detecting my video card. "Run media apps that can use hardware video transcoding." So I assume that means it's detecting my video card. I don't see a hardware tab here that would break all that out, but I'm assuming it's good to go. And then it says,
"Virtualization is supported. Virtualization lets you run operating systems like Windows in a virtual environment with supported hardware. You can even use your server as a regular PC." So I see what it's saying here. It's saying, "Hey, I can run classic virtual machines and run virtualization
because my CPU supports it. I can run accelerated virtual desktops because I have a GPU installed in here." And then it says, "I can run local accelerated virtual desktops with a connected monitor keyboard and mouse." So what this means is that I can actually run a virtual machine, but connect it to physical hardware and then run that virtual machine like it's my main machine, except for it's virtualized inside of TrueNAS or inside of HexOS. So very similar to what you can do with Unraid, Proxmox, but very cool. I still don't know if this checkbox means it's actually detected that on my system or this is just explaining what it can do, but either way, I know my system is supported. So storage pools. This is cool. This is our recommended
configuration based on your available devices. All right, so it sees my six hard drives and it says 40 terabytes of usable storage. So I assume then since I have six times eight is 48. So it's going to use one for parity. It says right here, "One drive can fail without data loss." So this is nice. What it's saying is hard disk drives are spinning disks and typically have slower response times, but larger capacity suitable for backups and general media files. So 40 terabytes, one drive can fail. So one, two, three, four, five, six, just showing what we already know.
So it's configuring this for maximum capacity, which is pretty nice. And then it's seeing my two USB drives. I wish that I could uncheck this or say to ignore it because I'm not going to create a pool on top of these two drives. It's kind of random that I had two plugged in, but it's nice to see that, hey, it's detecting this. So maybe this is something they can address in the future. And then one unused drive, which is my NVMe drive that would be nice if I can use for caching, but we'll see later on. So I can't uncheck this. And if I go into manual configuration,
oh, it's not available yet. So I assume that's something they need to work on. So yeah, it would be nice if I could say ignore this because it might format these drives, but let's continue and see what it does. All right, so almost done. We've collected everything we need to get your server up and running to make it easier to find and identify your server. You should also give it a name to make it easier to find and identify your server. You should also give it a
name. So that's on there twice. So they could remove this right here. So server name, let's just go easy and call it HexOS. And here are the pools it's going to create. Again, I don't want it to wipe these, but not a big deal if it does. And then let's confirm that it can wipe those and finish setup. So working on it, this may take some time. Once this is finished, you can start using your server right away. Any public shares should become visible on your network. Cool. So
that means it's automatically creating public shares for you. Now, I think that's something that Unraid does. I think automatically for you, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's not something that TrueNAS does. So this is kind of saying since this is a consumer NAS at home on your home network,
you're most likely going to share out some shares or some directories. And so they're going to set those up for you automatically. So initializing, creating, enabling Docker, creating default locations, assigning server name, updating services, and then complete. Okay, so let's go to the
dashboard and let's see what's going on. So hey, welcome to HexOS. Here are some shortcuts to get you started. You can always find these in the menu bars. We have configure users, add folders, explore the app catalog, and don't show this again. I'm going to say don't show this again, because we'll go through one by one. But once we're in here, we're on a dashboard, we can see the health of our system. And as we can see in this side drawer popping out, it's just telling us kind of the same thing. And then we can go to storage. We'll visit that later. The same it looks like
with processor in this side drawer that pops out, gives us some data or some feedback or some metrics on our CPU. So it's doing okay. Memory, same thing. So how much is used for cache and how much is in use over time? This should go to 100% because that's the great thing about ZFS. We want to cache every single thing that we can. Something that consumers don't need to worry about. But maybe,
I don't know, maybe you should tell someone in the future that hey, if you see all your RAM being used, that's a good thing. That's a good thing. And that's what you want. It does see my two nicks. So two 2.5. So it sees those. So I don't have a five gig Nick in here. It's actually 10 gigs. So this looks like might be a small bug. But you can see data coming in and out. We could see the details of this Nick maybe a little bit more. And we can. So a little bit more. Again, that's not a
five gig Nick. That's a 10 gig Nick. We can create a network bridge if we wanted. I'm not going to, but if we wanted to bridge a couple of adapters and create another bridge maybe for VLAN or something like that, we totally could. And then global configuration. Okay, so my server name, my DNS one, two, and three. Hey, I got three DNSs. But that's something that TrueNAS does too. They have three DNSs. So let's go back to the dashboard. And then we have our storage, which I assume that's going to take us to where storage is. But this is a little widget showing us our storage. And it's saying, hey, everything is good. And we do have roughly the 40 terabytes it said we're
going to get. And it's healthy. We can view drives if we want. And here we are again, seeing all of our individual drives. It pops out, gives us the details, and it looks pretty good. So status is online. I assume in the future, it's going to show us the smart status and checks for our hard drives. NVMe, not much to show there except for the temps. USB, what is the show? Yeah, just my serial USB drive and it's healthy. So if they know it's a USB drive here, they should,
I don't want to see filter those out when sending it up, but they should be able to group those in the UI somewhere and say ignore those because they do have the type is USB drive. So they are detecting the type. This is the developer in me thinking about how they can approve that. And they know that this is a solid state drive. They could probably determine it's an NVMe too, but that's besides the point. But again, like these shouldn't show up. Well, maybe they should show up when you're creating a pool, but allow you to ignore them too. In general, I think they should allow
you to ignore anything when setting up that pool, even if you're still using the wizard. So you don't have to go into manual when that comes to then ignore these drives. So dashboard, pretty straightforward. I think here's my user account. We could go light mode. Whoa, whoa, whoa, go crazy.
And let's go back to dark mode. Language, so internationalization, espanol. So we do have some espanol. Oh yeah, we do. Yeah, some of it, some of it. So it is kind of localized or internationalized, kind of, kind of. But I'm assuming it'll get there. And then here, power shut down. We have that and
then it looks like, oh, notifications. So we have our notifications up top here. We can view all, which this is taking us into our notifications. Okay, so let's get into some stuff that's a little more interesting, maybe than the dashboard. We talked about storage, so we don't need to go there. But one thing I didn't talk about was expand. So this is pretty cool. So this is a feature
that they're actually using from the latest TrueNAS, which is the ability to expand your ZFS pool. Now in the past, this hasn't been possible on TrueNAS. So if you're watching this now or in the future, it doesn't really matter because you could do it now. But this was a huge pain point with ZFS and it was nice to see that TrueNAS or IxSystem address this and then HexOS can piggyback and take advantage of that. So now we can expand our pool. So I assume if we added another drive, I could expand my pool. That would have been a great test. Should have installed five and then
pop one in and expand the pool. But I trust that that feature should work because it works with TrueNAS, but I'm not able to test it now. I can delete my pool if I wanted to, but I'm not going to go there. Inside of applications, you can see that we have two recommended applications. And
these are the applications that are pre-configured with HexOS. So what do I mean by that? Well, HexOS has applied a lot of optimizations and pre-configured a lot of these applications for you so that when you set them up, they're almost single click, if not single click. Whereas some of the other TrueNAS ones, if you ever configured that before, there's a lot of things to choose where you want your storage if you've created that storage, additional environment variables, and there's a whole list of stuff that you need to supply before you can even install the application. But if we look at Plex Media and we go to install this application, it's installing right away. And so they have an opinion on how this should be installed, how it should be configured, and where some of those files live and permissions and all of that. And they've done that for you. I think that's a good thing. If we go into locations, you can see what it's going to use. So it's going to use the applications
capacity. So I assume this is like bulk storage applications performance. I assume this would be a faster driver, faster pool that you had. I don't have one right now. And then media. So if we go into Plex, you can see that we have a very simplified configuration for it. We can launch
the application, we can stop it because it's currently running as that Docker container. We can go into settings or we can uninstall. So if we click launch, this should launch the application of Plex. Awesome. And so I can log in, I can configure it and adopt it. And that's pretty cool. So this is going to launch the Plex application. So it's already installed. If I go into settings, it actually takes me out to TrueNAS and I'm not sure exactly what to do here. I assume what's
going to happen in the future is that I will be able to log into TrueNAS and make some configuration changes at the detail level on the TrueNAS application. So I maybe see why they're doing this. They're saying, Hey, if you use our apps super easy, you get the default install. If you want to configure that or do anything special, we're going to kick you out to TrueNAS because they've already built that feature. And the reason I think that is because that's how all of the other applications that you install that aren't pre-configured by HexOS work too. I'm not going
to sign into TrueNAS and go into TrueNAS, but this is a good reminder that, Hey, it's running TrueNAS under the covers. You wanted to log in and configure something. You probably could. Now they haven't given me any guidance on what I should do or what I should configure or what I shouldn't touch. So I'm not going to touch anything for the sake of this demo, but just know that it is TrueNAS under the covers. And I assume in the future, they'll have some more guidance on what you should do in TrueNAS, what you shouldn't do in TrueNAS. But let's get back to our apps so I can uninstall this application and I can install image, do the same thing, click install and let's let that install. Now you do see other applications down here and you could see, I can install a
Redis database or Portainer or TDARR or handbrake. And you might be wondering, Hey, well, didn't you say there are only two applications that are supported? Yes, but these applications are coming from TrueNAS catalog. So if I want to install the pre-configured ones now by HexOS, those are only those two. If I wanted to install something outside of their catalog, but still depend on TrueNAS, I could. So if I want to install say portainer, I would click on portainer and it's saying, Hey, this app is not currently supported on HexOS. It must be installed and configured from the TrueNAS UI. And then it gives you a link to TrueNAS, which will pop me back
out to TrueNAS and then I'll sign in. So what they're doing is saying, Hey, we're going to curate a list of applications that will give you single click installs. And then for anything else we haven't done yet, you could then install it using TrueNAS. And then I think if then you
want to install an application that TrueNAS doesn't even support, I assume you would either install portainer or dockage and you would then configure it from there, or you would go into TrueNAS and do it a hundred percent manually using YAML or their form, which TrueNAS now supports. So you have a ton of options for most users in the future. I think they're going to be using these single click installs. And again, if I was to give this to my brother, I would say, yeah, just use the single click installs. If there's something not there, let me know and I'll help
you out with it. But future state, I would assume that all of these applications for the most part would have single click installs because that's where the value is coming in right here, at least from an application standpoint, you do get some value upfront by setting up storage ahead of time, setting up your pools. That's super easy to do. And then you're going to get some value out of these applications over time. So as they add more applications, hopefully you're getting more value by getting these single click installs. So now that we have those running images running,
we could launch it, go out to image and it's there. So image is pretty awesome, by the way, you should totally install it. If you do photography or video or want to back your phones up and don't want to back your phone's media storage up to the cloud, you can totally back it up to image and get a lot of other features. Anyways, this isn't a video about image or the apps, it's a video about HexOS. So again, applications only two are configured now, but hopefully more in the future. But let's check out folders really quick. And I kind of purposely skipped over that because I wanted to make sure that we configured some of our folders by installing those applications. But you can see
here within here, this is not just folders. And this threw me off at first. This is really folders and shares and users. And what do I mean by that? Well, you can manage folders on your own that you create, or you can manage the platform folders, which are kind of the HexOS shares are really true now shares. And there are also folders that those applications use. And you can also add users. So these are SMB users. So but let me show you what I'm talking about. First, remember a little bit ago, it said, hey, we're going to set up these public folders for you already. So if we go out to
our network, and you find this HexOS server, and you go into it, there's already some public share setups. So we have media, movies, music, photos, shows, and videos. So these are folders that Plex uses, but were automatically created by HexOS, along with applying the proper permissions at the OS level, and also applying the proper permissions at the SMB level to allow public users to use these. So again, that's an opinion that they have. They say, hey, this is an AsOS. You're going to be using it at home. One of the most popular things that people are going to set up right away are
shares for media. And on top of that, they're probably going to make that share, and they're probably going to make it open. Now, what if you don't want it open? Well, you can change that really easily. So if we go into this share, and we go into this media share, we can say, hey, instead of it being accessible to everyone, we can actually edit it and say, hey, it's private, and then only the administrator can access it. But what happens if you set up a service or have a friend or family member that has another machine, and you don't want to give them administrator access or the password to this SMB share? Well, what you can do is create a new user. Now, this isn't an OS user. It's an
SMB user just used for shares. So if I wanted to enter a new user, well, I'll just call it user, and then a password, I can add this account. And now you should see this new user here. And now we can add this user to the shares. So let's say I wanted to create a new folder and a new share, and I'll call it family docs. And I wanted to put this here. And I can choose the location. I only have one pool of these hard drives. So I'm going to place it there. And then I'm going to say,
who has access to this? Now, by default, it's public everyone, but I could say it's private. And then only this new user that I created call user, it's kind of confusing, has specific access to it. Now, I could say they don't have any access to it. And this is only private and only administrators can access it me. Or I can say, yes, it is private and the user called user has access and they have full or view only access. So basically full or view, read only or full.
So let's give this user full and then I can add this folder. So now I added that folder, added that user. And you can see now that this has a lock on it. So I have a share called family docs. It is private and it has a lock on it and only that user has access to it. And then if I go back out to my shares, you can see I have the family docs folder and I would need to connect to it as a different user. And I would have to say user and give it my password if I can remember.
Connect. And then you could see I'm connected inside of the share and I can create a new folder. I can create a new documents and do anything I normally would as a user of the share who has full access. So that's pretty nice. I couldn't imagine trying to walk my brother through setting up shares on TrueNAS because it's pretty difficult. Sorry, brother, I have three so you guys guess who it is. But that's pretty difficult, pretty challenging to actually create a user, create a share, you know, something that should be semi easy on a NAS. They've made it really easy on HexOS. They've
really simplified that piece of it. And outside of that, that's kind of all we see so far. There are some additional settings, some of the things we saw already reset and restore. Now I could wipe this NAS and start all over and reclaim it if I wanted to. But I'm not going to do that right now. I can see those notifications that we saw a little bit earlier. So folder user create like all of the logs and notifications you typically see. And then I could pop out to TrueNAS right here if I wanted and then application. So these are my application locations that we have configured. So I can't
modify them yet, but I could see the JSON for that. So cool. So I can see the JSON for that. That's probably developer for them to say, hey, here are the properties. And then later on, they're going to wire up probably a GUI to that and maybe a form or drop down or input. Sorry, developer and he's turning on. So yeah, that's HexOS so far looks pretty good so far. I know they've made a ton of progress since we heard that the beta was coming. But I do see that there is a lot of progress that they still need to make. If we look at their blog post talking about the road
to 1.0, we could see the beta one features and we saw most of that. So setup and configuration, storage, device management, folders and users, apps, dashboard UI and coming soon. So we didn't see the coming soon yet, but this is what's coming after it. What they're promising is the virtual machine manager. And I think that's going to be huge because some people, if you have a
single NAS and that's your main home server operating system, they're going to want to run virtual machines maybe at some point. So what I'm hoping they do is simplify that just like they simplified applications, right? If I want to create a Windows VM, I generally know the resources it should have at least off the bat. And from there, I could tweak it if I want. Same with the Linux server. If I was going to build an Ubuntu server right now, I kind of know in my head what the
template should be for that. So it'd be really nice if they just set that up for you. You could change the defaults and provision a virtual machine really easily. And hey, pass through my video card to it too because that's always kind of painful. At least on TrueNAS, it might not be as painful as things like Proxmox, but in general, that's kind of hard. And so I'm thinking and
hoping that they take care of some of those really hard things for you so you don't have to think about them. And why do I say that is because again, like this is a paid for product. So I want to make sure that if I do pay for this product, I'm going to continue to get value out of it. So what's coming in 2025? Okay, snapshots and replication. Pretty cool, pretty advanced features for home users.
So it would be nice to see how they simplify this. Like trying to explain, you know, hey, snapshots, pretty easy. Replication might be kind of easy to my brother in general, but you know, take snapshots to back things up, to restore to a point in time. And then replication is basically, you know, backing up or replicating all of your data to another machine, either offsite or onsite. Be interesting to see what they do if you need two licenses. I'm assuming you do. And if they do do
that, please make a buddy backup system. Let me friend someone who has this already. Let me use a target pool of say four drives that I give them and they give me four drives and let us have some buddy backup to be able to swap and replicate that data to another person or friend that I've friended because that would be awesome. Doesn't even have to be friended. You don't have to set up that feature, but that would be even more awesome. So local UI UX, this definitely has to be there. So right now I can't access HexOS over my local IP. If I go there, I get TrueNAS.
And so I'm going through HexOS to configure my NAS. And I know that's a showstopper for a lot of people. And they say it's coming in 1.0. I sure hope it's there. But because otherwise, again, that might be a showstopper for a lot of people. Would it be a showstopper for someone who may or may not know what that means? Maybe not. But for those who are informed, I think that would be a
showstopper for them. And it might be a showstopper for them to recommend it to their friends and family. Because I think that's really where this product is going, right? That leads me into who is this for? Now, is this product for me? Well, kind of, sort of, because I'm in the industry. I'm going to track this product. I want to support them. I want to follow it as it develops. But that's not
important. But would it be for me as a technical person who already has a TrueNAS server set up, tuned? I have a slog. I have an L2 arc. You know, I have everything finely tuned on my TrueNAS server. And you know, is this for someone like me? Probably not. I'm most likely not going to replace my TrueNAS server that I have already with HexOS. Now, some people might because they might say,
"Hey, TrueNAS is way too complicated." But for me personally, I'm not going to. And so, who does that leave? Well, it might be people who haven't built a NAS yet or are using other NAS operating systems like Unraid. And I kind of think that this is where this is going. It's really going to be for the people who either are using Unraid now and want to use something different for whatever reason, or they just want to move away from it for whatever reason, although it's a fine operating system and a fine product. Or it's for the people who haven't built their NAS yet and haven't decided what the
operating system is going to be. Now, you know that's a pretty daunting task if you're non-tech and you want to build a NAS. After you pick all of the hardware, then you have to pick the operating system that goes on top of it. And most people aren't that informed on what they should put on there. And so, that's where I think that people like us are going to come in and we're going to
start recommending things, right? So, what do we recommend now? Well, we might recommend a Synology because it's easy. We don't want to support their thing forever and it's got great apps. We might recommend Unraid because it's pretty powerful, pretty easy, has a huge community, and it's really, really developed. Or we may recommend TrueNAS if you want to do tech support for them for the rest of their life. Again, this isn't a jab at TrueNAS. It's an enterprise storage solution. And it's hard for me to recommend an enterprise storage solution to someone who's not fully tech like I am. So, again, I think this is pretty interesting because people like me might start recommending HexOS to non-tech people because they know how powerful and how solid TrueNAS is. And then they can get all of the niceties that come with HexOS. That being said, is it worth it?
Yeah, I can't answer that. You're going to have to decide if that's worth it for you or if it's worth it for you to recommend to a friend. But I still think that there's a lot that needs to happen before it's an easy recommendation for me. Now, I've seen a lot of progress that they made and I know it's backed by Linus, so it's probably going to be pretty good. So, you could put some, maybe put some stock in that. But for the most part, if I didn't know all that, it would be a hard
recommendation right now in its current state. There are a lot of promises. I do think they're going to deliver on those promises. But again, this is a very early state, a very early product, and it's only in beta one. So, tough for me to recommend, to tell people to go out and buy right now. But again, knowing it's backed by Linus and knowing the development team behind it, it's a pretty okay recommendation for now, especially for the price. If you're thinking
about doing this now and you just want to have it in your back pocket, 99 bucks, I think, is a pretty fair price to have it for the rest of your life for one machine. So, anyway, so this has been a quick look at HexOS and the progress that they've been making. I'll continue to track this operating system as it develops. And as we get close to a 1.0 or a final release to the public, I will definitely review this and have some tutorials on it. And yeah, I'm Tim. Thanks for watching.
2024-12-02 16:00
