That's what a virtual machine is: a complete, separate computer with its own operating system, running on your server's hardware alongside your storage and your apps. It can be Windows. It can be Linux. It can be a purpose-built appliance like Home Assistant. And it gets the same HexOS treatment as everything else: pick what you want, answer a few questions, and let the server do the rest.

Virtual Machines are in beta today, rolling out automatically to everyone over the next few weeks, and they lose the Beta tag alongside Buddy Backup on Black Friday.

Why would I want one?

There are more uses for a VM than we could list, but here are a few of our favorites to get you thinking.

Your server can also be your desktop. Set up Windows 11 or a friendly Linux desktop like Mint or Zorin, and you've got a full PC living on your server that you can reach from any computer on your home network. Prefer to game? Bazzite and SteamOS are on the menu. And because the desktop is its own computer, you can reboot it whenever you like. HexOS keeps running, your files stay reachable, and your apps stay up while the desktop comes back.

A lab you're allowed to break. If you tinker, you know the feeling of wanting to try something without risking the machine you rely on. Spin up that Linux distro you keep hearing about before you commit your laptop to it. Keep a few test environments around for different operating systems and browsers. Stand up an enterprise platform at home to learn it for work. When you're done, delete it and start over.

Virtual appliances. Some applications are built to be delivered as a complete virtual machine rather than as a standard app, and they work better that way. Think of the VM as the packaging: instead of installing the app, you install a small, purpose-built computer that has the app already inside it. Home Assistant OS is the headline example, with the complete, feature-rich version rather than the more limited app edition. OpenWrt is here for people who want to run their own router software. Game-server platforms like CubeCoders AMP3 fit the same mold. And soon there will be a dedicated media server VM for Plex and Jellyfin built around older graphics cards, so a GTX 10-series card you've had in a drawer can go back to work transcoding your media.

Setting one up

Here's the whole flow for Windows 11. Other operating systems are similar, and appliances skip most of it.

Name it and point at the installer. For Windows, you paste a download link from Microsoft's official page and your server fetches the installation media directly. You can also supply your own installation media file.

Create your login. Pick a username and password. This is the account you'll sign into the first time; you can add others inside the VM later. On Windows, this is a local account, and you can sign in with a Microsoft account afterward if you prefer.

Pick your apps. This is the part we're most excited about. Tick the boxes for the software you want, and it will already be installed when you first sign in. Browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Brave. Discord, Slack, Signal, Zoom. Spotify, VLC, OBS. LibreOffice, Steam, VS Code, and more. The same list works for Windows and Linux desktops, and it's growing.

Storage. HexOS proposes a sensible install disk on your fastest pool. You can change the size or the pool, and you can add extra disks on whatever pool makes sense. The install disk can always be grown later.

Resources. Two sliders for processor cores and memory. HexOS shows you what's reserved for itself, what your other apps and VMs are already using, and where the sweet spot is for this particular operating system. If you'd rather not think about it, press Set recommended.

Review and create. Then walk away.

What happens next

This is where a HexOS virtual machine differs from every other VM you may have tried.

HexOS writes a custom, hands-off installation script for your VM on the spot. It installs the operating system, loads the drivers a virtual machine needs to run well, sets up your account, enables Remote Desktop on Windows, and installs every app you selected. You never click through a setup screen. You don't get shown the VM at all until it's completely finished, so nothing can interrupt the process. When it's ready, you sign in to a computer that's already set up the way you asked.

One note on Windows: HexOS installs it and gets it ready to use, but activation is up to you. Enter your own Windows license inside the VM whenever you're ready, exactly as you would on any new PC.

Connecting and keeping an eye on it

Every VM gets a Connect button, and HexOS picks the right door for each kind. Windows offers a Remote Desktop session or a built-in console. Linux desktops and servers get the console. Home Assistant and OpenWrt open straight to their own web interface, with the console available as a backup. For now, console access works from devices on the same network as your server.

That built-in console deserves a word of its own. It's based on SPICE, an open-source project for viewing virtual machines in a browser, and our own Eric Schultz has spent the past month rebuilding large parts of it. Smooth video streaming in the console, audio that plays reliably, touch and trackpad support so you can drive a VM from a phone or tablet, fixes for keyboard quirks like Num Lock and international layouts, faster drawing, and a long list of stability improvements. The best part is that this work is going back to the SPICE project itself, with nineteen of those changes already accepted upstream and more on the way, so everyone who uses SPICE benefits, not only HexOS users.

The VM's info panel gives you a live preview thumbnail, its IP address, and real-time CPU, memory, network, and disk activity, so you can see what a VM is doing without connecting to it. It also shows the address to paste inside the VM to reach your server's folders, so getting your new desktop connected to your storage is a copy-and-paste job.

Nothing you chose in the wizard is locked in. Open the Resources tab to give a VM more cores or memory. Open Disks to grow the install disk, and on Windows, HexOS extends the partition for you so the extra space just appears. Power, Rename, and Uninstall are right there too.

What's on the menu

Browse categories and you'll find three groups.

Desktops: Windows 11 Pro, Windows 10 Pro, Ubuntu Desktop, Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, Zorin OS, Fedora Workstation, Fedora KDE Plasma, openSUSE Leap, CachyOS, Bazzite, SteamOS, and Omarchy.

Servers: Ubuntu Server, Debian, Fedora, Fedora CoreOS, Flatcar, Rocky Linux, and AlmaLinux, in current and previous versions.

Appliances: Home Assistant OS and OpenWrt. More are coming!

If what you want isn't listed, Custom VM lets you bring your own installation media and set it up yourself.

Coming during the beta

A few things will arrive before the Beta tag comes off: assigning a graphics card or USB device directly to a VM (so your server-desktop can drive a monitor and peripherals, and the media server VM can use that older GPU). We'll share more as each one lands.

Try it, or tell someone

If you'd like to help test, sign up for the beta here. Otherwise, everyone will get Virtual Machines automatically over the coming weeks.

And if you're as excited about this as we are, the best thing you can do for a small team is share it. Post it, send it to a friend who's been thinking about a home server, and tell them what you plan to run on yours.

There's a moment every home server owner eventually has. You've got your photos, your projects, your family's digital life all safely stored on your own hardware, protected against a drive failure, running without a problem. And then you wonder: but what if something happens to the whole server? Natural disasters or horrible mishaps: a fire, a flood, a drop down the stairs mid-move, or a toddler lovingly pouring a juice box into the chassis. All your redundancy lives in one box, in one building.

The traditional answer is to rent space from a cloud storage company and pay them every month, forever, based on how much data you have. Which is a strange ending to the self-hosting story, isn't it? You built your own server to get away from renting your digital life from someone else, and then the industry tells you the only way to protect it is to start renting again.

We think there's a better answer, and it has been on our feature list since day one: Buddy Backups, the ability to back up your HexOS server to a friend's HexOS server. It's now entering early rollout, so it's time to talk about exactly what it is, how it works, and what to expect.

The idea: back up to people, not corporations

Buddy Backups is built on a simple premise. You probably already know someone you trust: a friend, a sibling, your parents. And that person's home is, conveniently, not your home. If they have a HexOS server too (or you help them set one up), their server can hold an encrypted copy of your most important folders. If disaster ever strikes your house, your data is safe at theirs.

No monthly per-terabyte bill. No terms of service that can change without warning. No mega-corporation that can lock your account, throttle you, or decide your data is suddenly against policy. Just an arrangement between two people who trust each other, the way keeping a spare house key with a neighbor has worked for generations.

And to be clear about the trust involved: your buddy holds your backup, but they can never read it. More on that below.

How it works

You ask. From the Command Deck, you send a backup request to your buddy using their email address, along with how much space you'd like to reserve on their server.

They accept, on their terms. Your buddy receives the request through HexOS notifications. To accept, they choose which of their servers will receive your backup, which storage pool it lands on, and they can adjust the storage limit up or down from what you asked for. Their server, their rules.

Your servers connect directly whenever possible. By default, the two servers connect directly to each other over a secure, encrypted, peer-to-peer link. If your network blocks direct connections (some ISPs do), traffic automatically falls back to a relay so your backups keep flowing. During the beta, relay access will be free for all users.

Your data gets backed up, fully encrypted. Your data is encrypted before it leaves your server and it stays encrypted on your buddy's server. It never exists in readable form on their machine, even for a moment. Your buddy can see how much space your backup is using, but never what's inside it.

Requests are one-directional, and nobody has to back up in return. If you and a friend want to back up to each other, you each send a request and that's all it takes. If your parents just want to host your backup and never send one back, that works too. You decide what arrangement makes sense; HexOS just makes it easy.

You're also not limited to a single buddy. At launch you can back up to multiple buddies and host backups for multiple buddies, so you can spread your protection (and your generosity) however you like. You control the schedule, too: each backup can be set to run daily or weekly, on the day of the week and time of day you choose. So if you're running backups with several people, you can spread them out so they're not all competing for the same overnight window.

What your buddy controls

Hosting a backup should never mean giving up control. The recipient of a backup can set and adjust how much space is reserved for each buddy, see how much of it is in use, and end a backup arrangement at any time, for any reason. Storage stays under the owner's control, always.

The same is true in reverse, of course: the person holding your backup can stop holding it whenever they choose. Which is exactly why Buddy Backups is designed around real relationships. Back up to people you genuinely know and trust, not strangers.

Backups between your own servers

If you own two or more HexOS servers (say, one at home and one at the office or a relative's house), you can create backups between them without any permission requests, since you're on both ends of the arrangement. Encryption is also optional in that case.

A few things to know

Your passphrase is yours. For your privacy and security, HexOS does not store a copy of your passphrase in our cloud. Nobody can unlock your data but you, and that includes us.

Danger: If you lose your passphrase, nobody can recover your data, including HexOS. Any backup you restore will stay locked forever. Keep your passphrase somewhere safe, and not only on the server being backed up.

Bandwidth controls are built in. Backup traffic won't take over your connection. You can set a rate limit yourself, or choose Smart and let HexOS handle it: the system measures your connection's throughput and caps backup traffic at half the maximum, so your streaming, gaming, and video calls keep running normally while your backups run. One clarification: this is a rate limit, not a data limit. Your full backup will still transfer regardless of the speed it runs at, so if your ISP imposes a data cap, watching it is still up to you.

Both sides need HexOS at launch. Sending and receiving backups will require each participant to own a HexOS license and run a HexOS server. Non-HexOS systems won't be attachable to the buddy network at launch.

The technical details

If you want a comprehensive explanation of what's happening underneath, read How Buddy Backups works in our documentation for the full breakdown.

The rollout has begun

Buddy Backups is rolling out right now, starting with a select group of users for early testing. From there, we'll expand access in waves as we harden the feature, until it's ready to be marked complete and stable for everyone. Backup software has exactly one job (being there when you need it), so we're going to earn your trust the slow way.

Want in? Sign up here to participate in the beta. And in the meantime, start thinking about who your buddy is going to be. Bonus points if they owe you a favor.

The HexOS Team

In short

• Buddy Backups and Virtual Machines are beginning to roll out to test users now.
• The file browser and app cards are both getting deeper integrations with apps.
• All of this makes up HexOS 1.1, which ships on Black Friday this year (Nov 27, 2026).
• The $199 early access sale ends December 1, when standard pricing of $299 per server takes effect.

Buddy Backups

If you've followed HexOS for a while, you know we've been working toward this one for a long time. Buddy Backups let you back up your data to a server owned by someone you trust, whether that's a friend across town or a second HexOS box of your own in another location. No monthly per-terabyte bill. No giant cloud company holding your files. Just people backing each other up, on hardware they control.

We're starting to roll out access slowly, beginning with a small group of testers and expanding from there as the feature matures. Our target is to have Buddy Backups exit beta by the end of November.

Another blog post will go up tomorrow with an even deeper dive on this feature and how it works. Stay tuned!

Virtual Machines

Right alongside Buddy Backups, Virtual Machines will start reaching test users very soon.

We wanted virtual machines in HexOS to feel like everything else in HexOS: something you can set up without a tutorial open in another tab. So the whole process is wizard-driven, start to finish. Pick what you want to run, answer a few questions, and HexOS handles the configuration. You can even select apps to install automatically the moment the operating system finishes installing, so your virtual machine is actually useful the first time you log into it.

Virtual machines are organized into three categories:

• Desktops — a full graphical OS you can use like any other computer.
• Servers — systems with no graphical desktop, for running services and workloads.
• Virtual Appliances — purpose-built images like OpenWRT or the Home Assistant virtual machine, ready to run with minimal setup.

There's a lot more to say here, and Virtual Machines will get their own dedicated post this week as well.

Deeper app integrations

One theme is going to show up again and again in HexOS over the coming months: the Command Deck shouldn't just launch your apps, it should work with them. Two places you'll see this first are the file browser and your app cards.

A file browser that does more than move files

The file browser we shipped in August covers the essentials: browse, upload, download, copy, move, rename, delete. That's the starting point, not the whole plan. We want the HexOS file browser to be a tool you use for real work, not just a place to move folders around.

It already does something most file browsers don't: burn ISO images directly to a USB drive plugged into your server. Next up are integrations with the apps you've already installed. Take FileFlows as an example. Instead of opening FileFlows, configuring a flow, and pointing it at a directory, you'd click a file in the HexOS file browser and convert it from MPG to MP4 right there. FileFlows does the work; HexOS gives you the button. That's the pattern we're building toward across all kinds of file tasks.

App cards that show you what's happening inside

Today, an app card tells you an app is running and how much CPU and RAM it's using. But what about what's actually happening inside the app?

Picture your dashboard showing what's playing in Jellyfin right now, what's queued and downloading, or who's connected to your game server, all without opening any of them. Our vision is for the HexOS dashboard to be the single place to see everything happening on your system, apps included. There's a lot more to unveil here as we build it.

HexOS 1.1 ships and early access pricing ends on Black Friday

All of this and more are the core of HexOS 1.1, and it all ships on Black Friday. That's also when early access pricing ends. The $199 early access sale ends December 1, and standard pricing of $299 per server for a lifetime subscription takes effect.

The detailed Buddy Backups post comes next, and as always, tell us what you think in the community.

We think that's a bad deal for home users, and last month our CEO, Jon Panozzo, sat down with Allan Jude of Klara Inc. for a webinar on the fix: a new ZFS feature called AnyRAID. If you're not a storage nerd, don't worry — we're going to walk through what it is, why we cared enough to help fund it, and when you can expect to actually use it.

Prefer to watch instead of read? Here's the full webinar:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/FEXPQMw5BiQ?si=ZzSInH0HSe0JgZtE

Otherwise, read on for the breakdown below.

Why Eshtek and HexOS Sponsored This

Here's the thing: HexOS exists to make self-hosting and home servers accessible. And one of the most common frustrations we hear from our community is exactly this drive-mismatch problem. Home servers rarely start out with a matched set of identical drives — they grow organically. You add a drive here, replace a failing one there, maybe inherit a couple of drives from an old PC. Traditional RAID punishes that kind of setup.

That's why we made the decision to sponsor this project with Klara. Mixing and matching drive sizes without losing capacity isn't a nice-to-have for home servers and self-hosters — it's one of the most practical, wallet-friendly improvements ZFS could get. We wanted to see it happen, so we put resources behind it.

The Problem with Traditional RAID-Z

Without getting too deep into the weeds: in a traditional RAID-Z array, every drive is treated as if it's the size of the smallest drive in the group. Mix two 4TB drives with two 6TB drives, and ZFS treats the whole array as if it were four 4TB drives. That extra 4TB of space across your bigger drives? Gone. Wasted.

It gets worse when you try to upgrade. Swap a small drive for a bigger one, and you still don't get any benefit until every drive in the array has been replaced. For enterprise environments with matched hardware, this isn't usually a big deal. But for home servers built from whatever drives you have on hand, it can mean giving up a huge chunk of the storage you paid for.

How AnyRAID Fixes This

AnyRAID takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of treating whole drives as building blocks, it breaks every drive into small, equal-sized chunks called "tiles." Those tiles get mapped to physical locations on your disks and striped together to form your storage array — and because tiles (not whole drives) are the building block, ZFS can pull extra tiles from your larger drives instead of ignoring that space.

The practical upshot: mix a couple of 4TB drives with a couple of 6TB drives, and you actually get to use that extra capacity, instead of watching it go to waste. In our testing scenarios, this recovered more than an entire drive's worth of usable space in some mixed-drive setups — without giving up ZFS's data protection.

And because AnyRAID tracks where tiles live with a "map," it opens up flexibility that was never possible before:

• Expansion — add a new drive, and its space becomes available right away, without changing your array's protection level.
• Rebalancing — ZFS can shuffle tiles around behind the scenes to make the best use of new, larger drives you add later.
• Contraction — you can actually remove a drive from an array and have its data safely relocated elsewhere, something that just isn't possible with traditional RAID-Z today.

What About Performance?

Any time you change how storage works under the hood, there's a fair question: does it slow things down? The honest answer is: a little, in certain scenarios — but it's very unlikely to matter for a home server.

The tradeoffs AnyRAID introduces mostly show up under intensive, latency-sensitive enterprise workloads — think busy databases or high-transaction business applications. For the kind of things a home server or self-hosting setup is actually doing — media streaming, file storage, backups, running a handful of apps — AnyRAID will perform just fine. This is a case where the flexibility gain is worth far more than the performance cost, especially for the audience it's built for.

When Will You See This in HexOS?

We know this is the question everyone actually wants answered, so let's lay out the roadmap as we currently understand it:

1. OpenZFS 2.5 — targeted for later this year, likely toward the end of 2026. This is where the full AnyRAID feature set lands upstream, including AnyRAID support for RAID-Z1, Z2, and Z3 (the initial 2.4 release only covered AnyRAID mirrors), along with pool contraction and rebalancing.
2. TrueNAS SCALE — once AnyRAID is accepted upstream, the next step is getting it into TrueNAS SCALE, which will likely be the SCALE 27 release, expected sometime next year.
3. HexOS — the final step is bringing support into HexOS itself. Since we build on top of TrueNAS, this should be the simplest part of the journey. Our goal is to have this done by the end of 2027.

We want to be upfront that these are our best current estimates, not promises. Upstream open source development can shift based on code review feedback, testing, and priorities we don't fully control. But the trajectory is clear, and progress is being made.

The Bottom Line

AnyRAID solves a real, everyday problem for home server builders: it lets you actually use the capacity of mismatched drives instead of wasting it, it makes growing (or shrinking) your storage array far more flexible than it's ever been with ZFS, and any performance tradeoffs are the kind that enterprise workloads need to worry about — not home servers.

This is exactly why Eshtek chose to sponsor this project in the first place. We want ZFS to be as efficient and approachable as possible for the home server and self-hosting community, and AnyRAID is a big step in that direction. We'll keep you updated as it makes its way through OpenZFS, into TrueNAS SCALE, and eventually into HexOS itself.

By Jon Panozzo

Maybe you've heard about home servers. Maybe a friend won't stop talking about how they cut their streaming subscriptions and built their own private media library. Maybe you watched a YouTube video that made it look incredible — your movies, your music, your photos, all in one place, accessible from anywhere, completely under your control.

And then you tried to actually set one up. And it wasn't like the video made it look.

That gap — between how exciting the idea sounds and how overwhelming the reality feels — is exactly what HexOS was built to close. This week, we're taking one of our biggest steps yet toward that goal. We got to demo it live during the June 12th LinusTechTips WAN Show. If you missed it, keep reading.

First, Some Honest Talk About Home Servers

Here's something the enthusiast community doesn't always say out loud: setting up a home server is hard. Not impossible, but genuinely, surprisingly hard — especially when you're doing it for the first time.

Installing the hardware or the operating system is just the beginning. Every application you want to run has its own setup process. And unlike installing an app on your phone, home server apps don't just work out of the box. They expect you to know things. Things like what Docker is. What an environment variable is. What a port mapping is. What a file path looks like and why it matters.

If none of those terms mean anything to you, that's completely normal. Most people getting into home servers for the first time feel exactly the same way. And that's a problem, because none of those things are what you actually wanted when you decided to build a home server. You wanted the apps. You wanted the experience. You wanted the control and the privacy that comes with owning your own setup.

The technical concepts are just obstacles standing between you and that.

Introducing Application Preconfiguration

Today, HexOS is introducing Application Preconfiguration: a feature that automatically handles the post-install setup of select apps on your behalf, so that when you open an app for the first time, it's already configured and ready to use.

Not every app supports this yet. We're rolling it out starting with the apps where setup friction is highest and the payoff for eliminating it is greatest. The first three are Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby, three of the most popular media servers in the home server community. More apps will follow. But to understand why this matters, it helps to understand what setting up one of these apps normally involves.

What Installing a Media Server Actually Feels Like

Let's say you've decided to try Plex. You've heard great things. You install it on HexOS, you click launch, and now Plex is staring at you, waiting.

The first thing it wants you to do is sign in to a Plex account to "claim" your server. Okay, you make an account, you sign in, and you're sent back to a dashboard. Now Plex wants you to name your server. Fine. But then it asks you to create your media libraries, and this is where things start to get confusing.

A "library" in Plex is essentially a folder on your system that Plex monitors for content. You need one for Movies, one for TV Shows, one for Music, one for Photos. For each library, Plex needs you to point it to the exact folder path on your system where that content lives. But if you're new to this, you're now asking yourself questions you didn't expect to be asking: Do these folders exist yet? Where are they supposed to be? Am I supposed to have created them already? What does this path even mean?

So you open a second browser tab to look it up. The first guide you find is from 2021 and references a version of Plex that looks nothing like what's on your screen. You try another. That one assumes you already know what a mount point is. You're now three tabs deep, reading forum posts, trying to figure out a prerequisite to a prerequisite, and you haven't even gotten the app working yet.

This is what cognitive overload feels like in practice. It's not one hard thing. It's a cascade of unfamiliar concepts, each one blocking the next, each one pulling your attention further from the reason you started. And for a lot of people, this is the moment they close the laptop and decide home servers just aren't for them.

That's the moment we're trying to eliminate.

How Preconfiguration Works

Rather than walk through it in text, here's a short video that shows exactly what the experience looks like:

Why We Started With Plex (And Then Kept Going)

Plex was the natural starting point for preconfiguration. It's one of the most requested apps in the HexOS community, and its setup process is a textbook example of the friction we're trying to eliminate.

But when Plex announced plans to significantly raise their lifetime license pricing ahead of July, we moved fast. We didn't want our users to feel like they only had one option. So alongside Plex, we immediately prioritized preconfiguration support for Jellyfin, a fully open-source alternative that requires no Plex account at all, and Emby, giving you a real choice of media server, all with the same seamless setup experience.

All three launch this Thursday.

This Is What HexOS Is For

The appeal of a home server is real: more control over your data, more privacy, software that works for you instead of the other way around. But for too long, the cost of entry has been a steep and discouraging learning curve that has nothing to do with any of that.

HexOS exists to change that equation. We handle the infrastructure, the complexity, the configuration — so you can focus on the part that actually matters: using your apps and experiencing what your home server can do.

Application preconfiguration is that philosophy applied directly to the apps themselves. Not just making them easy to install, but making them genuinely ready to use the moment installation is done. No second browser tab. No forum posts. No wondering if you did it right.

Just open the app and go.

This is the first of many apps we'll be bringing this experience to. Anywhere we see an opportunity to take something off your plate and get you to that "wait, this is actually incredible" moment faster, we're going to take it.

Because that moment is worth it. You just shouldn't have to fight for it.

Application preconfiguration for Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby is available now. If you've been curious about home servers but intimidated by where to start, this is exactly the kind of thing HexOS was built for.

By Jerod Fritz

Three weeks ago we announced HexOS 1.0. Today we can confirm that every existing customer has been migrated to HexOS Local, the new locally hosted architecture that powers it.

What We Actually Pulled Off

Migrating thousands of production servers to an entirely new architecture without asking anyone to reinstall, without scheduling downtime, and without losing a single byte of data is not a small thing. It is the kind of work that, in most organizations, gets planned in quarters and executed over weekends with maintenance windows. We did it incrementally, by order of purchase, while every server stayed online.

Each migration required automated DNS provisioning, SSL certificate generation via a formalized partnership with Let's Encrypt, and installation of the HexOS Local app, all orchestrated from our cloud infrastructure and triggered per user. The legacy hosted backend has been fully deprecated. New customers now onboard directly to Local.

This was building a plane while flying it, and the plane landed.

Why It Matters

When we first previewed the Local architecture last November, the pitch was simple: your Command Deck should talk to your hardware, not to us. That is now reality for every HexOS user.

The majority of your day-to-day interactions with Command Deck now go directly to your server. Pages load faster, app installs respond instantly, and the interface feels like the native tool it was always meant to be. Some operations, like initial setup, monitoring, and network recovery, still pass through our cloud services to keep things running smoothly. But the heavy lifting is local.

Just as importantly, this architecture is the foundation for everything ahead. Smarter app preconfiguration, buddy backups, and features that simply were not possible when every action had to round-trip through the cloud are now on the table.

Post-Launch Stabilization

The weeks since launch have been heads-down on stabilization. We have shipped over 25 production deploys in that time. We resolved a race condition where servers rebooted without a network connection would fail to start Docker, causing the setup wizard to re-appear. We fixed app version display mismatches that made updates look like downgrades. We caught and suppressed an erroneous TrueNAS 26.0-BETA.1 update notification before it could cause real damage. We tuned session handling, fixed dashboard button states, and restored custom apps that had disappeared after migration.

The full list of fixes is in the release notes.

New Customer Experience

With 1.0 out the door, we have refreshed what new customers see when they purchase HexOS. The home page reflects 1.0 availability, the FAQ confirms it is live, the cart page is cleaner, and new buyers now receive a welcome email with step-by-step getting started links and an invitation to join the community.

What's Next

With Local behind us, the team is focused on:

• Expanding the curated apps catalog with more one-click installs and deeper preconfiguration. This is the highest priority coming out of 1.0.
• Buddy Backups (1.1) for peer-to-peer encrypted replication between HexOS servers.
• VM support (1.2) for creating and managing virtual machines from the HexOS interface.
• System health improvements with guided action paths for degraded states and drive failures.
• Documentation overhaul by consolidating community guides from our forums and other sources into docs.hexos.com as a single, comprehensive knowledge base for all things HexOS.
• New website and ecommerce experience to support subscription pricing alongside the lifetime license. We have no intention of removing the lifetime license, but Early Access pricing is coming to an end soon.

Thank You

Thank you to everyone who helped us identify and reproduce issues during the rollout. Your willingness to share logs, test edge cases, and provide detailed reports made this a smoother transition for everyone.

We are also bolstering our communication and customer support by rolling out our public Discord server. Whether you have a question, want to share feedback, or just want to hang out with the team and other HexOS users, find us there anytime.

By Jonathan Panozzo

HexOS 1.0 is here, and HexOS Local is rolling out now. We've begun deploying to early access users, with broader availability expanding every day based on order of purchase. This is the release we've been building toward since day one.

What HexOS Local Means

The biggest change you'll notice is speed. HexOS Local runs directly on your machine. No more round trips to our servers for every click. When you're on your local network, you're talking directly to your hardware, and it feels like it.

We heard you. After the initial preview, local control was the most requested feature from our community. We dropped everything to prioritize it. Today, we're delivering on that vision. Everything runs on hardware you own, the interface is hosted on your server, and the new architecture bridges local and hosted experiences automatically. Whether you're at your desk or on the road, HexOS routes you to the right interface.

What to Expect When You're Enrolled

Automatic migration. When your account is selected, HexOS Local will be installed on your server automatically. No manual steps required. The next time you log in to Command Deck, you'll be prompted to re-authenticate. Your credentials stay the same.

Automatic local redirect. All DNS, SSL, and certificates are handled automatically. You'll still use deck.hexos.com to authenticate, but as soon as HexOS Local is loaded and you're on the same network, you'll be redirected automatically. Some browsers may ask permission to access local network resources. This is expected.

Switch between Local and Cloud. You can always switch between Local and Command Deck from the server dropdown.

This Is HexOS 1.0

When we published The Road to 1.0 back in November 2024, we outlined the vision for a stable release. In our Roadmap Update a year later, we narrowed it to four milestones. With Local here, all four are shipped:

• Apps Platform Overhaul - Smart categories, instant search, GPU detection, and a growing curated library.
• Goldeye Compatibility - Full support for TrueNAS SCALE 25.10 with the NVIDIA open GPU kernel module.
• UI Polish - Rebuilt dashboard, overhauled storage views, redesigned forms, and mobile-optimized dialogs.
• HexOS Local - A locally hosted management interface. Same experience you know, just faster.

HexOS started with a simple idea: owning a home server shouldn't require an IT background. Your data, your hardware, your terms. The biggest barrier was always the complexity of the software, and that's what we set out to fix.

Under the hood, TrueNAS provides the enterprise-grade storage backbone that businesses have trusted for years. HexOS is the orchestration layer on top, bringing that same level of resiliency to every user through proper app configurations, guided storage management, and a polished interface that stays out of your way.

We're also investing in the future of the filesystem itself. Our sponsorship of ZFS AnyRaid, developed by the team at Klara Systems, is solving one of ZFS's longest-standing limitations: the inability to efficiently mix drives of different sizes. AnyRaid will bring real versatility to the most modern filesystem in the world, ZFS, and it benefits everyone. HexOS isn't just your software. Through partnerships like these, we're paving the way for the future of data storage.

What's Next

We're not slowing down. Here's what we're focused on:

System Health and Recovery

Customer feedback has made one thing clear: when a system enters a degraded state, it's not always obvious what to do next. We already surface notifications and let you manage drive replacement and expansion, but we want to go further. We're introducing guided action paths for critical issues and improved messaging around degraded states and drive failures.

Smarter Apps

With Local behind us and a dedicated apps team in place, we're turning our attention to the app experience. Think preconfiguration, smart migrations, and sanity rollbacks during upgrades.

The team has been deep in the weeds on this, building proof of concepts across our curated apps. Plex and Immich are coming first. Imagine installing Plex and having your libraries preconfigured. Or Immich with smart pathing handled for you, no post-install clicks. Down the road, the entire app ecosystem will get the HexOS treatment.

Buddy Backups (1.1)

Peer-to-peer encrypted replication with integrated networking. You and a buddy protect each other's data, no third-party tools required. Your data stays safe, fast, accessible, and yours forever. More details in our Roadmap Update.

Join Us on Discord

We want to be closer to our users. We're opening up direct access to the HexOS team via our Discord server. Many early testers are already there, but now everyone is welcome. This is your direct line to us.

Thank you to everyone who has been with us since the beta. Your feedback and patience continues to shape this product. We're just getting started.

By Jon Panozzo

We're thrilled to announce a complete overhaul of the HexOS Apps platform that fundamentally transforms how you discover, install, and manage applications on your system. This update represents months of work listening to community feedback and reimagining what an app center should be.

A Complete Interface Redesign

The new Apps interface isn't just a fresh coat of paint—it's a ground-up rebuild designed to make finding and managing apps effortless.

Smart Categories organize the app ecosystem into intuitive sections like Media & Entertainment, Productivity, Development Tools, and Smart Home. No more endless scrolling to find what you need.

Instant Search delivers lightning-fast results as you type, searching across app names, descriptions, and functionality. Whether you remember the exact name or just know what you want to do, search finds it.

Curated Apps Section highlights freshly curated applications as they become available, ensuring you're always aware of new additions to the ecosystem.

Popular Apps Section shows what's trending in the community, helping you discover apps that other users are finding valuable.

Visual Indicators now clearly distinguish between fully supported apps, experimental releases, and non-curated applications, so you always know what level of support to expect.

Nine New Curated Applications

We're expanding the curated app library with nine excellent additions:

• Nextcloud - A file sharing server that puts the control and security of your own data back into your hands.
• Emby - Feature-rich media server and streaming platform
• Bazarr - Automated subtitle management for your media library
• Scrutiny - Hard drive health monitoring and S.M.A.R.T. data analysis
• Handbrake - Professional video transcoding and conversion
• Lidarr - Lidarr is a music collection manager
• PeaNUT - A Tiny Dashboard for Network UPS Tools
• Syncthing - A continuous file synchronization program
• Draw.io - A whiteboarding / diagramming software application.

Each of these apps has been carefully curated with optimized configurations to work seamlessly with HexOS.

Intelligent GPU Configuration

One of the most exciting features in this release is automatic GPU detection and configuration. HexOS now intelligently identifies available GPU resources and automatically attaches them to applications that can benefit from hardware acceleration and transcoding.

This means apps like Plex and Jellyfin can immediately take advantage of your GPU for smooth, efficient media transcoding without manual configuration. We're eager to hear your experiences with this feature, so please share your feedback in the Discord.

Smarter Curation Management

Apps themselves have always been able to update, but now their curations can update too—and we properly version those updates. This means we can improve and refine app configurations even for applications you've already installed.

Even better, you can now edit app configurations after installation without reinstalling. Purchased a Plex Pass and want to enter your claim code? Just click "Options" and add it. Need to adjust settings? No more reinstall required.

Performance That Matters

Under the hood, we've made substantial performance improvements:

• Cloud-based app catalog eliminates round trips to individual servers, providing instant app browsing and search shared across all HexOS users
• Reduced API calls through intelligent batching operations
• Smart caching for GPU detection and system queries eliminates redundant checks

The result is an interface that feels snappy and responsive, even on lower-powered systems.

Goldeye Support

This release enables users to update to TrueNAS SCALE 25.10.1, bringing all the latest improvements from the TrueNAS team to your HexOS system. Notably, this release uses the NVIDIA open GPU kernel module, which brings wider hardware support to NVIDIA GPU users.

Two-Factor Authentication

Security is paramount, and we've added the option to configure two-factor authentication to protect your HexOS account. Enable 2FA in your account settings for an additional layer of security.

Expert Mode for Power Users

As HexOS continues to grow, we recognize that our user base ranges from home users to seasoned IT professionals. The new Expert Mode toggle in Preferences reveals advanced settings and shortcuts for those who want more granular control over their system.

Try It Today

The new Apps platform is available now. Here's what we'd love you to do:

Explore the new interface and discover apps you might have missed before. The improved categorization and search make finding the perfect tool easier than ever.

Install a GPU-accelerated app like Plex or Jellyfin and experience automatic hardware acceleration. Let us know how it performs.

Share your feedback with us in our Discord. Your input directly shapes the future of HexOS.

Take advantage of our Holiday Sale before it ends on December 31st. It's the perfect time to expand your HexOS capabilities. HexOS lifetime license

And finally, mark your calendars: HexOS 1.0 is coming in Q1 2026. This Apps overhaul is just the beginning of what we have planned.

Thank you for being part of the HexOS community. We can't wait to see what you build with these new tools.

Release notes are available here December 26, 2025 - Apps Overhaul, 2FA, GPU Detection, Goldeye Compatibility

It's hard to believe it's already been a year since we launched the HexOS Beta and the early access campaign. What a journey it's been! In today's blog post, we're going to provide a summary of this past year's accomplishments, a run-down of what's left to achieve our 1.0 release, what's coming next, an update on the AnyRaid project, and our HexOS Holiday Sale!

A Year in Review

Since launching the beta, our team has been hard at work transforming HexOS into the powerful, user-friendly platform you see today. Over the past twelve months, we've delivered substantial improvements across the board.

In the early months following launch, we focused on strengthening the foundation. We expanded our team and focused on building fundamental backend systems for our platform to support our long-term goals. We enhanced the setup wizard with improved functionality and existing data detection and implemented additional confirmations for destructive actions to protect user data.

By mid-year, we introduced manual pool configuration, a game-changer that gave users granular control over drive participation and storage layouts. This update also brought the Activity Center, providing a centralized hub for system notifications and event tracking. We continued refining the platform with networking fixes, performance improvements, and folder loading optimizations that made everyday interactions faster and more reliable.

The fall marked a major milestone with the introduction of our app curation system. This opened the door for users to create, customize, and share install scripts for any application they wanted to see on HexOS. We then expanded our team again to put dedicated focus towards growing our app library, which has grown our curations beyond Immich and Plex. We’ve quickly added Jellyfin, Home Assistant, qBittorrent, and more recently Sonarr, Radarr, and Prowlarr. We also rolled out the Folder Wizard, extending simple folder creation with encryption support, quota management, and Time Machine backup capabilities.

Throughout the year, we launched our comprehensive documentation site, bringing together getting-started guides, feature documentation, troubleshooting resources, and release notes in one centralized location. We improved the First Flight onboarding experience with progress tracking and persistent guidance banners, making HexOS more approachable for newcomers to home server management.

Behind the scenes, we invested heavily in infrastructure improvements. We deployed an end-to-end testing suite that dramatically improved our development workflow and code quality. We added support for TrueNAS SCALE Fangtooth (25.04), implemented enhanced user management capabilities, and refined countless smaller details, from install script improvements to upgrade timeout handling for older hardware. The response from our community has been incredible, and your feedback has been instrumental in shaping the direction of HexOS. Thank you for being part of this journey with us.

The Road to 1.0: What's Left

We're excited to share that HexOS is approaching a major milestone. There are four primary components left for us to reach a 1.0 stable release:

1. Apps Interface Refinements

Our Apps interface is getting a significant upgrade coming this December. This update will feature:

• Proper category organization to help you find what you need faster
• Full search functionality
• Massive performance improvements
• Enhanced UI/UX polish throughout
• An expanded library of curated applications

We're confident this update will make discovering and managing your apps more intuitive than ever. And here’s a sneak peek:

2. TrueNAS SCALE 25.10 (Goldeye) Support

TrueNAS SCALE 25.10 was released in October, and we're preparing to bring full support to HexOS. Following the 25.10.1 release slated for December, we will be adding official support to HexOS. Going forward, we'll be following this same cadence: HexOS support for SCALE releases will typically be available following the .1 patch of a major release. This approach ensures maximum stability for our users and gives us the time we need to address any API changes.

3. UI Polish and Bug Fixes

While HexOS is already highly functional, we're committed to delivering a polished, refined experience. Our team is currently working through the remaining minor bugs and applying additional polish throughout the interface. These seemingly small improvements add up to create a significantly better user experience.

4. HexOS Local

The most significant feature we promised to deliver before marking the product as 1.0 is a locally running UI/UX. This has been a top priority for our team, and we're excited about the progress we've made. HexOS Local represents a fundamental shift in how you'll be able to interact with your system, providing greater control and flexibility. In case you missed it, we recently published a blog: all about HexOS Local.

Beyond 1.0: Buddy Backups and Virtual Machines

We know many of you are eager to hear about features like Buddy Backups and Virtual Machine support. Both of these features are slated for release in 2026 in the following order:

HexOS 1.1: Buddy Backups

Following the 1.0 release, we will be immediately shifting focus to Buddy Backup as the next major feature to be delivered. We're excited to share that we've actually expanded the scope of this project. Buddy Backups will now include peer-to-peer networking as an integrated component of the solution, rather than relying on third-party applications to achieve that goal. We really want the entire experience to be as seamless as possible, and this expanded approach will deliver exactly that.

HexOS 1.2: Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines (VMs) are a powerful way to run complete operating systems on your HexOS server in isolated environments, similar to how containers work but with full OS-level virtualization. This allows you to run Windows, Linux, or other operating systems alongside HexOS, each with dedicated resources and complete independence from one another. While traditional VMs are typically used in a headless capacity with remote graphical display (accessing the desktop over the network), HexOS VMs will take this a step further. We're building support for direct hardware passthrough, allowing you to assign graphics cards and USB devices directly to a VM. This means your HexOS server can double as a physical desktop PC. Imagine booting into a Windows VM with full GPU acceleration for gaming or creative work, all while your server continues to handle storage, apps, and other tasks in the background.

VMs were delayed last year due to significant changes within TrueNAS SCALE that made ongoing development challenging. However, the platform has since stabilized, and we're eager to get back to work on this feature following the Buddy Backup release. When VMs arrive in HexOS, they'll include curations similar to Apps, allowing you to take advantage of pre-configured templates for common use cases, greatly reducing the technical burden from our users.

AnyRaid Project Update

One of the most exciting developments this year has been our sponsorship of the ZFS AnyRaid project. Introducing ZFS AnyRaid. Traditional ZFS has a significant limitation when it comes to mixing drives of different sizes in a pool: the system can only utilize capacity equal to the smallest drive in each vdev, leaving larger drives severely underutilized. For example, if you have a vdev with three 4TB drives and one 8TB drive, traditional ZFS would only use 4TB from each drive, wasting 4TB of the 8TB drive's capacity. AnyRaid solves this problem by intelligently distributing data across drives of varying sizes, dramatically reducing wasted space and giving HexOS users the flexibility to upgrade their storage incrementally without sacrificing capacity—all while maintaining the data protection benefits of ZFS.

This year marked significant progress on the ZFS AnyRaid project, sponsored by Eshtek and developed by the talented team at Klara, Inc. The team designed an innovative adaptable tile architecture that enables data layout changes in ZFS—a groundbreaking capability that addresses one of the long-standing limitations of ZFS storage. They successfully implemented the new AnyRAID vdev type along with a tile allocation algorithm that maximizes available space. Throughout the year, they added support for critical ZFS functions including checkpoint, sequential resilver, mirror parity, and RAID-Z parity. The team presented their technical achievements at the OpenZFS Developer Summit, and they're currently implementing data rebalance functionality to allow efficient online data movement. This work represents a major step forward for the ZFS ecosystem and will ultimately benefit all HexOS users.

When Will 1.0 Release?

We committed to our community that we wouldn't release 1.0 until the Local UI was available. That project has grown in both scope and capability, evolving into something even better than we originally envisioned. It is for this reason that we are shifting the release date of 1.0 to Q1 of 2026 (by March 31, 2026).

This additional time will give us the opportunity to properly finish our development work and complete the beta testing required for us to feel comfortable with a stable release.

HexOS Holiday Sale

To celebrate the holidays and thank our community, we're excited to announce our HexOS Holiday Sale, starting today! Existing customers can purchase additional licenses for just $99 each, perfect for expanding your home server setup. New customers can take advantage of our special two-pack bundle for $298, with additional licenses available at the same $99 promotional price. Single licenses remain available at $199 until our 1.0 release in Q1 2026. This holiday pricing for additional licenses and the two-pack bundle is available through December 31st, so don't miss out on this opportunity to join or expand your HexOS experience.

Please note: License transfers are not permitted. All licenses are tied to the purchasing account.

Thank You

We're incredibly grateful for the support of our early access community. Your feedback, bug reports, and feature suggestions have been invaluable in shaping HexOS into what it is today. We're more excited than ever about the future of this platform, and we can't wait to share what's coming next.

Stay tuned for more updates, and as always, please reach out to us with questions or feedback.

Since the launch of the HexOS beta, all users have been managing their systems through the online-hosted Command Deck at deck.hexos.com. This has been the fastest way for us to keep everyone on a consistent and stable experience while we built out the foundation of the product. This was an architectural choice we made for two primary reasons:

First, it gave us a means to update our UI/UX without requiring any user intervention.
We push the update to deck.hexos.com and everyone gets it immediately. No button to push. No reboot required. No compatibility issues between different versions. When we fix a bug or add a feature, every user has it within seconds. This velocity has been invaluable for moving quickly and iterating based on user feedback.

Second, it made secure remote management access very easy to provide.
No port forwarding. No complex DNS setup. No SSL certificate management. You can access your server from anywhere without exposing anything to the internet or becoming a networking expert. It just works.

These benefits are real, and they've served us well. As the product has grown, we've also heard consistent feedback: HexOS users want local control. The performance that comes from talking directly to hardware sitting on their own network; resilience that doesn't depend on hosted infrastructure, and perhaps most importantly, the philosophical alignment of managing a self-hosted server through a self-hosted interface. That’s why today, we're excited to announce HexOS Local.

What HexOS Local Brings

HexOS Local runs directly on your HexOS system, bringing four primary benefits:

Performance: Local operations will perform much faster. No more round trips to our servers for every click. No more waiting for responses to travel across the internet and back to replace a failed drive or add a folder. When you're on your local network, you're talking directly to your hardware.

Resiliency: You will be able to perform core management tasks even if the cloud deck is unavailable. You'll still have full access to your local management interface. All the core NAS functionality you need will always be available.

Sovereignty: All management is local to your system and under your control. Your configuration, your preferences, your data. It all lives on hardware you own, accessible through an interface running on your own server.

Features: While hosting the management interface will be the primary feature of HexOS Local, there are additional capabilities that it will enable. Pre-configuring applications themselves (not just their installation) and addressing app-specific issues with hotfixes (when necessary) will also be possible. We are extremely excited about the potential here and will post more in the future when we have examples to share.

How Will HexOS Local Work Exactly?

The initial installation and setup of HexOS will remain exactly the same. You'll install via the ISO, then claim and provision your initial storage pools using deck.hexos.com, just like you do today.

Once your initial storage pools are configured, we'll automatically download HexOS Local to your server and provision local access automatically using dynamic DNS and proper SSL certificates. And for existing users, adoption of HexOS Local will happen without user intervention. Our goal is to make this as seamless as possible.

All local access will resolve automatically, and remote access will still be enabled via deck.hexos.com. Whether you're sitting at your desk or away from home, you'll be able to manage your server. The difference is that when you're local, you'll get the speed and resilience benefits of talking directly to your hardware. And by keeping HexOS Local separate from the OS itself, we can update the management interface independently from the underlying operating system. UI improvements don't require OS updates. OS updates don't force interface changes. Everything stays modular, maintainable, and focused.

What Features Can I Use Through HexOS Local?

All features of HexOS will be accessible through the Local app. The interface will be identical to what you're using today, just faster and locally hosted.

Cloud-based features like app and VM curations, buddy backups, and email notifications will require the Command Deck. Local-only features such as storage and folder management will not. Managing your core NAS functionality won't depend on the cloud.

When Will HexOS Local Be Available?

An updated roadmap will be posted soon with details on when this and other features will be launching in HexOS. We know all of you have been waiting patiently for this capability since we first launched the beta. Thank you for that patience. We're building this right, and we're excited to get it into your hands.

HexOS Local represents a major step forward in our vision for what HexOS should be: a powerful, enterprise-grade NAS platform that's as easy to use as a smartphone, running on hardware you control, managed through an interface you host. We're getting closer every day.

As we continue to bring more transparency to our development, I wanted to highlight some of the work happening at HexOS, even if it’s not something users directly interact with.

A New Way to Test

We’ve been hard at work and are excited to share a significant improvement to our development workflow: a dedicated end-to-end (E2E) testing suite.

Before this, much of our testing was done manually. That meant when we made an update to folders, we had to test every possible scenario: encrypted folders, multiple users with different permissions, quotas enabled, systems with slower hardware, or situations where a folder is being created but no users exist. You could imagine how time consuming this could be.

This new infrastructure provides better coverage across local development environments and gives the team greater, more efficient ways to test our work.

Testing in Action

Here’s an example of tests validating app installation from our curated templates, verifying they run correctly and uninstall cleanly.

This is just one category of tests. We have the ability to test nearly every aspect of the HexOS platform, from storage operations to network configurations.

Automated Testing with GitHub Actions

Beyond running tests locally, we've integrated the E2E suite with GitHub Actions to automatically run tests. The workflow uses dedicated test servers running different TrueNAS versions (Eel, Fangtooth, etc.), each pre-configured with the necessary credentials.

Tests can be triggered manually in GitHub Actions to target a specific platform or all platforms, with specific test suites (auth, reset, apps) or the complete suite. There's also an optional pull preview URL parameter for testing in-progress Command Deck PRs.

Here's an example of the GitHub Actions workflow and what the downloadable results look like.

Real-World Impact

This new testing suite has already proven valuable during our 25.x compatibility work with Eel and Fangtooth. The comprehensive coverage helps catch issues early in the development cycle, before they make it into production.

Better local testing means:

• Earlier bug detection - Issues are caught before creating PRs
• Improved confidence - Developers can verify changes across the full app ecosystem
• Faster iteration - Quick feedback loops during development
• Better quality - Fewer regressions make it to users

Along with benefiting our developers' local environments, this opens the possibility of making our E2E repository public so app curators can add their own app-specific tests when building new curations.

Moving Forward

All new tests for future functionality will be added to this suite where feasible. As we continue to expand HexOS, adding features like snapshots, replication, and advanced networking, having robust E2E coverage will be crucial to maintaining quality and development velocity.

We hope that sharing a glimpse of what’s happening behind the scenes is just as exciting for you as it is for us. We'll continue to share interesting details about our development as they come!

We're excited to share what we've been working on this quarter. With this update we are introducing app curation, as well as a few new curated apps. App curation will allow users to create, customize, and share install scripts for any app they want to see on HexOS. We've also launched our official documentation site, improved the onboarding experience, and added some powerful new folder management features. Let's dive in.

Read the full release notes

App Curation

By enabling experimental features in Settings > Preferences, users can now access the Custom Script option for app installs. From there, you can tweak existing install scripts, create entirely new ones, and share them with the community or submit them to the official HexOS curation templates.

To go along with custom installs, we’ve added some fresh curated apps: Jellyfin, Home Assistant, and qBittorrent. We’ll keep building on this curated set over time, and we can’t wait to see the contributions from the community.

Documentation Site

Alongside app curation, we launched our official documentation site. This centralized resource brings together getting-started guides, feature documentation, troubleshooting help, release notes, and community resources.

It simplifies the process of finding information and helps new users get settled with their hardware. We look forward to seeing how the community contributes to both documentation and apps.

First Flight Improvements

Our initial onboarding experience left a little to be desired, so we enhanced it. Progress tracking now shows which tasks you've completed and what remains. A persistent banner lives at the top of every page, keeping First Flight guidance accessible across HexOS. These improvements make the platform significantly more approachable for users new to home server management.

Folder Wizard

Much like manual pool configuration in Q2, folders received a makeover as well. We extended the simple folder creation interface with a wizard-driven process. Along with this UI update, we added several new options. Folders can now be encrypted (if enabled in experimental features), quotas can be set, and you can back up using Time Machine.

This is a crucial step forward as we prepare for other promised features like snapshots, replication, and buddy backup.

Looking Ahead

Now that Q3 is behind us we can look towards what the team is focusing on next.

We're preparing to upgrade to TrueNAS SCALE 25.10, which brings major VM improvements, and NVMe over fabric capabilities.

Local UI is also on the way, addressing one of the most requested features from our community. While the Command Deck remains our primary interface for initial setup and remote access, Local UI ensures you'll have access to the HexOS interface for system management even during Command Deck maintenance windows. This is a core component of our 1.0 release.

It's really exciting to see community members contribute. Between official curations and community submissions, the app ecosystem is going to continue to expand.

Along with this update is a plan to utilize the docsite and blogposts as a more regular way to communicate with you all. It is clear we haven't been as communicative as we could be and we are going to change that. Although we are still figuring out exactly what that looks like, expect to see more frequent blog posts in the future.

Q2 kicked off summer with a focus on user control and customization. This update delivered on promises we made back in March in our Q1 status update, giving users more flexibility in how they configure storage, manage notifications, and personalize their HexOS experience.

Manual Pool Configuration

Users now have far more control over pool creation. During setup, you can use HexOS' recommended storage layout, adjust it to your needs, or skip it entirely and handle it later at your convenience. This process extends beyond the initial server setup and into your main storage page, so you can configure it at your convenience.

Activity Center Replaces Health Card

We completely overhauled notifications and activity tracking. The old Health card became the new Activity Center, which now displays all notifications: server alerts, updates, user actions, and active tasks that may be taking a bit of time.

All activities are also available in the archive for a complete record of what's happening on your server.

TrueNAS SCALE 24.10.2.2 Update

With notifications redesigned, and a new activity center, users now have the ability to update the OS on your local server itself. These types of updates will always propagate to the top so you don't miss them.

Customizable Location Preferences

Previously, there was no way to alter app locations and other storage preferences. Now users can customize default locations for applications, giving more freedom in how the system functions.

User Settings & Preferences Sync

As we look toward expanding customization, we laid the groundwork for user settings. There is now a dedicated space for theme preferences, language selection, and the ability to toggle visibility on what appears on your dashboard.

UI and Stability Polish

We refined card layouts across the interface, added password field visibility toggling, increased the username character limit to 30, and shipped numerous behind-the-scenes stability fixes to round out the release.

Command Deck Updates - July 2025

With these foundational features in place, July was focused on performance, observability, and stability improvements. (July 7th update, July 28th update)

We began by instrumenting the Command Deck with detailed request timing metrics. This gave us insight into performance bottlenecks and allowed us to make targeted optimizations. You may have noticed things felt a bit snappier.

Building on those insights, we shipped networking fixes for users switching between DHCP and static IP modes, along with a queuing and caching layer for folder operations. This improvement was crucial for users with large folder counts, preventing API overload with TrueNAS while maintaining responsiveness. We also fixed a bug that caused folders to appear missing when a private folder user had been deleted.

At the beginning of this year, we made the decision to invest a substantial chunk of capital to support an open source project for which we have great personal interest. ZFS AnyRaid will give users the ability to mix different sized drives in a pool, a highly-requested feature since our launch. Just this week, Klara, Inc. announced the details of this project on the ZFS Leadership call. The project is still in heavy development but this week's announcement puts everyone on notice that this is coming.

What's different about ZFS AnyRaid?

In traditional ZFS RAID-Z the usable space of a group of disks in a pool is limited by the size of the smallest disk. For example, if you mix 2x3TB and 2x5TB disks it will be the same as having 4x3TB disks. In addition, if you upgrade one of those 3TB disks to 5TB, you're still limited to 4x3TB disks. AnyRaid will change those rules by enabling much better flexibility than traditional ZFS methods.

Long story short: you'll be able to mix up those disks and get better usable capacity than you would have before.

Pool Layouts & Usable Space Comparisons

With ZFS AnyRaid, two new layouts will be added:

• AnyRaid-Mirror
• AnyRaid-Z1

Usable Space Comparison

For a configuration with 1x4TB, 2x6TB, and 1x8TB drives:

Project Phases

Phase 1 Goals

The first phase of the project focuses on these key areas:

• Indirection Map - A new layer that enables flexible data placement across drives of different sizes
• Mirror Parity - Enhanced mirroring capabilities that work with heterogeneous drive configurations
• Layout Optimization - Intelligent algorithms to maximize usable capacity with mixed drive sizes
• VDEV Expansion - The ability to expand existing virtual devices with different sized drives

Phase 2: RAID-Z Support

The second phase will extend AnyRaid capabilities to include RAID-Z configurations, bringing the same flexibility to parity-based layouts.

Project Credits

This project is being developed by Klara, Inc. with significant contributions from:

• Allan Jude - Project lead and ZFS expert
• Paul Dagnelie - Core ZFS developer
• Igor Ostapenko - Key contributor to the implementation

We're incredibly excited to sponsor this work and bring these capabilities to the HexOS community. The ability to mix drive sizes has been one of the most requested features, and we're thrilled to support the open source development that will make this possible for everyone in the ZFS ecosystem.

Stay tuned for more updates as development progresses!

As we hit the half-way mark for Q2, we have a lot to talk about. The next update is still on track and chock full of features, quality of life improvements, and bug fixes. We're having our first official offsite team meeting in just a few short weeks to prepare for our upcoming dev cycles. And if that's not enough, tonight's ZFS Leadership call is looking mighty interesting. Hope to see you there ;-).

How HexOS Updates Will Work

Once the Q2 update drops for the Command Deck, users will notice the previous Health card on the dashboard has been replaced with a new Activity card. Within this card, users will get various messages relating to specific actions on the system, including the availability of OS updates.

A note of caution: users can elect to update the underlying OS through the TrueNAS UI which is accessible from the Settings page (so long as you are on the same network as your server). However, we do not encourage this behavior as a general practice as this update process escapes our control and may break functionality with HexOS in the future.

QoL and Bug Fixes for the Q2 Release

The previous blog post covered some of the big features we're rolling out, but there are also some much needed quality of life updates and bug fixes planned as well. Here's a short list from our dev team:

Activity Center

• Ability to Update HexOS
• Better visibility for dismissed and unread notifications/activities

Preferences

• Ability to not only turn off display of apps, but also adjust dashboard display (storage, system cards)

General

• Updated storage card on UI
• Updated UI island
• Updated password functionality (eye for toggling password visibility)
• Usernames no longer restricted to 8 characters (max 30)

Jellyfin & App Updates Coming in Q3

While we have plans for improvements to both Plex and Immich in our future, I wanted to take a moment to make a public commitment now that our next curated app will be Jellyfin. This completely free and open source solution with a sleek user interface has been a breath of fresh air for many, and I hope to even get Linus from LTT to use it in the not-too-distant future.

In addition, the ability to update apps through the Activity Center will also be coming in Q3. For now, users still need to do updates for apps through the TrueNAS UI itself (Settings -> TrueNAS -> Apps).

Eshtek's First Team Meeting in June

It's amazing to me that in just a few short months from our debut, we've quadrupled in size. It's been absolutely surreal. As mentioned at the beginning of this post, the entire Eshtek team will be gathering together in Chicago, Illinois in early June to wrap up the Q2 update and plan out our next dev cycles. We intend to do these twice a year going forward, and use these sessions to discuss and shape projects for the future.

Thanks again for supporting us on this mission and I'll be back soon with another update!

Hard to believe it's already March of 2025. It seems like only yesterday we were just launching our Black Friday sale. I guess time flies when you're having fun, and we're having an absolute blast building HexOS! In today's blog post, we want to give you guys an update on all that has transpired since the launch, and an updated look into the roadmap.

From Launch to Now

We launched the early access sale and the HexOS Beta on Thanksgiving, with the sale ending the following Monday. In the course of those 5 days, we sold over 25,000 lifetime licenses, achieving 5x over expectations. On behalf of the entire Eshtek team to those that have purchased, we greatly thank you for your support.

Thanks to the success of our launch, we needed to reprioritize some projects and tasks. Building an expanded dev/test environment, improving our remote-work infrastructure, reorganizing code and repositories, deploying new IT systems, and hiring additional talent became top priorities. We also kept scaling our hosted infrastructure for our forums, e-commerce, and the Command Deck.

And we're pleased to report that since our launch, we've completed ALL of the above-mentioned priority objectives. We deployed new server virtualization environments for us to easily spin up instances of HexOS for ourselves, trusted testers, and developers/partners. We've improved our network infrastructure to increase our local performance, security, and reliability. Our code and repos are now far more organized and ready for contributions from our growing team of developers. We've deployed Intercom to help manage customer service and simplify operations. We also purchased and built new test systems with a variety of hardware.

When it came to recruitment and hiring, we had a few people earmarked for positions prior to the launch and thanks to our success, we were able to bring them all on board at the beginning of January. Furthermore, we spent a good chunk of time at the beginning of this year reviewing CVs and conducting interviews for additional developer positions. We whittled over 150 applicants down to four technical evaluations. At the completion of those evaluations just recently, we hired two and we couldn't be happier with our choices. We are actively working on a new page for the site to introduce you to our growing team.

In addition, we also pushed a few minor quality-of-life improvements to the platform including the ability to manually discover your server in the setup wizard by WAN IP address (useful for scenarios where you're not on the same LAN as the server you wish to configure).

All in all, we are incredibly thrilled at how quickly we were able to adapt to our overwhelming success, and at the pace we're moving now, we see nothing standing in our way of getting to 1.0.

TL;DR: The early access sale was so successful that we had to take a minute to expand our tech, processes, and team MUCH sooner than expected. We are very excited to be bringing HexOS to you faster and with more features than we ever thought possible!

Coming in Q2

With our first wave of hiring and planning now complete, the team has been back focused entirely at grinding out some pretty major improvements to HexOS and the Command Deck. Here are some specific features we intend to deliver in the next update for HexOS.

Customizable Location Preferences

When users add applications to their HexOS server, various folders need to be created for the purpose of storing various data related to those applications. Applications tend to need a place to store their configuration, logging, and sometimes additional places (e.g. a place to perform media transcoding such as with Plex). In some instances, multiple applications will need access to a single folder. HexOS simplifies application deployments for users by automatically creating the necessary folders as applications are installed. In the next update we have planned, we intend to make all of these locations fully customizable, for users that may have special requirements or simply wish to override our default values.

And as always, all of our implementations are designed to work seamlessly between desktop and mobile platforms.

New Activity Center

We are also overhauling how we're handling activity and dashboard notifications in this new update. We realized having a giant Health card didn't make a lot of sense. Instead, we have changed it to the Activity card which allows us to filter pertinent messages for the user regarding server health, updates, and other notifications.

Notifications that you dismiss will enter the Archive, which you can visit at any time to see a log of all activities on your system.

User Settings & Preferences Improvements

Similar to how our forums work, preferences such as light/dark mode and language selection will now be stored as a part of your profile, allowing these preferences to automatically apply whenever you login from any device. You'll also be able to disable the display of certain apps from the dashboard (for privacy or other reasons).

Manual Pool Configuration

Whether during the initial setup or when adding a new pool to your system, we want to give users the ability to further customize their pool layouts. This feature is also a precursor for us to support the adoption of existing TrueNAS SCALE systems that wish to migrate to HexOS without losing their data.

This feature will affect both the initial setup wizard as well as New Pool creation under the Storage page. Note: removing drives from an already configured pool is not supported.

Stability Improvements

In addition to all these major features, we are also prioritizing bug fixes and stability improvements.

These updates will be coming in Q2 to HexOS. Stay tuned to the forums for an announcement!

Other Roadmap Updates

While the previously mentioned features are already far into development, we also have an updated priorities list that we want to share.

Rescheduling VM Support

Similar to what happened with Docker, iXsystems is in the process of migrating TrueNAS SCALE to a new VM and Linux Container management environment in their next major release, 25.04. Incus promises to provide a few key feature improvements, including a better web-based VNC agent. As such, focusing on VM management features in the short term didn't make sense given that the ground would be moving beneath our feet. Furthermore, in temperature checking our current community, it appears that increasing application support and buddy backups are of a higher desire. It is for these reasons we have lowered the priority of VM features. Keep in mind, you can still create VMs within TrueNAS itself, and we will give you start/stop controls from our Command Deck dashboard for them.

Coming Q3: App Curation Templates

While Plex and Immich are great, if it wasn't obvious enough already, we have plenty of other applications we want to see curated over time. To accelerate that process, we are announcing our plans to build an App Curation Templating System! This system will provide a way for others to curate apps for use within HexOS! This could be app developers themselves or community contributors that just want to see their favorite home server app get curated a little faster. We'll have more to say about this initiative in the near future, so stay tuned!

Coming Q3: New Folder Features

Building upon our simple folder creation interface, a new wizard-driven process will allow for specialized use cases such as encrypted folders and backups (e.g. Time Machine). This feature is a prerequisite that is needed before we can begin work on Snapshots, Replication, and Buddy Backup.

We are still planning on a 1.0 release this year, and we will keep you all up to date as development progresses and if any of these priorities change.

With the launch of the HexOS beta and early access program, we are taking this moment to highlight the features we are delivering now, and what we have slated to get us to our 1.0 release in 2025.

Beta 1 Features

Our first release is focused on providing a streamlined user experience for setup and configuration and laying the framework for what's to come. The main features of Beta 1 include:

Setup and configuration wizard

• Configure your home server in minutes with ease.
• Analyze system health, with warnings for SMR HDDs.
• Auto-configure storage pools to safeguard against device failures.
• Securely manage your server remotely via Command Deck.

Storage device management

• Detect error states and conditions and report through the dashboard
• Highlight individual storage devices and their respective faults
• Replace devices from storage pools due to failure or preventative maintenance
• Expand pools as little as one device at a time

Folders and users

• Create and share folders over your local network.
• Easily manage permissions for secure access.

Apps

• One-click deploy Immich as a personal photo library app.
• One-click deploy Plex as a home media server.
• Automatic folder creation for app storage.

Dashboard / UI

• Access key statistics like CPU, memory, network, and storage usage at a glance.
• Monitor storage health and see alerts for errors or degraded pools.
• Manage multiple servers from a single, unified interface.
• Enjoy mobile-responsive design for effortless navigation on any device.

Coming Soon

Our upcoming Virtual Machine (VM) Manager aims to simplify traditional and hybrid VM setups. Imagine creating a Windows desktop VM or a dedicated media player with ease—combining physical and virtual hardware for unique use cases.

We're also planning on making the storage wizard more customizable and adding SMART testing options during setup.

2025 Major Features

Snapshots and Replication

Looking at what's coming next for HexOS—it's something truly exciting. As we step into the new year, we're focusing on two revolutionary concepts: snapshots and replication. Snapshots are like magic bookmarks for your data, capturing moments in time you can revisit whenever you need. They're not just a safety net; they're a game-changer, especially for applications and virtual machines. And replication? It's how we make syncing data between HexOS systems smarter and more seamless. Starting on your local network is just the beginning—because what's next is something transformative.

Introducing buddy backups. Imagine replicating encrypted data securely, not just across your home, but over the internet. It could be to another system you own, or even better—to a buddy's system. Think about it: you help each other save money, protect your data, and elevate your backup strategy. This isn't just a feature—it's a new way of thinking about collaboration, community, and the future of your digital life.

Local UI/UX

One area in which we have received a lot of feedback has been in regards to a local UI/UX. While we still believe this is the right solution for initial server setup/configuration and for most remote access needs, we have decided to make a Local UI/UX and we are committed to delivering this with our 1.0 release. This means that even during Command Deck maintenance windows, you will still have access to the HexOS UI for system management.

Apps

The goal of apps on HexOS is to enable users to deploy them with minimal effort. This means automatically creating folders, assigning permissions, and taking other actions to optimize the user experience for any given app. We've started with Immich and Plex as powerful examples. Our goal for 2025 is to expand the catalog exponentially through partnerships with vendors, container authors, and developers.

Other Features

While the major features get all the glory, we have a bunch of minor features we want to incorporate as well including:

• Email and eventually SMS alerts to important events on your system including unexpected downtime, device failures, and more.
• Automatic recommendations for newly added hardware; applies to storage devices, graphics, and other peripheral controllers.
• A data import wizard to simplify copying data from direct and network-attached storage devices
• To supplement buddy backups, an integrated cloud-based backup offering using TrueNAS/Storj

1.0 is Just the Beginning

At HexOS, we envision a future where home servers empower individuals to protect and manage their most valuable data independently. With community collaboration, we aim to build a knowledge base of hardware insights, enabling everyone to benefit from shared experiences and best practices. There's much more in store, and we'll continue to share as we go.

Thank you for joining us on this journey. Together, we're shaping the future of home server technology.

Owning a home server is incredibly empowering and rewarding. It gives you control over your data and privacy. It reduces subscription costs and your dependency on the cloud. However, for those who aren't IT-savvy, existing products can be difficult to set up and maintain. That's why we created HexOS – to make owning a home server a breeze. With HexOS, you'll enjoy a guided approach to configuration and simple management. And things like remote access, monitoring, syncing, and much more are made just as easy.

HexOS combines a simplified UI, automations, workflows, and managed services with user-provided hardware to offer elegant home server management for off-the-shelf server appliances, custom-built hardware, and even recycled PCs. Powered by TrueNAS, the world's most deployed enterprise-grade storage platform, HexOS provides a highly reliable and easy-to-use solution to store, use, and protect your data. In this article, we'll take a closer look at how HexOS works to make all of this possible.

Getting Started with HexOS

The first step on your journey to achieving some cloud independence is to obtain some hardware. Whether you repurpose an old PC or purchase a brand-new server appliance, you start by installing HexOS. The HexOS installer loads TrueNAS SCALE with a few additional components required for system discovery and connectivity management. During the install, users create an admin password, which will later be used to claim their server through the HexOS app.

Setting Up Your Server

At this point, users will open a browser from a device on their local network and log in at deck.hexos.com. Unclaimed servers on the same LAN will be detected and can be claimed by entering the server's admin password. This will authorize and connect your system to the HexOS Command Deck, which organizes all actions requested through HexOS into jobs and queues them in priority.

A simple example of this is our setup wizard. While we let you do this and queue all that work behind the scenes, it's very important that when we provision the server, we first create the storage pools, then the folders, then the users, and then apply the permissions. And based on the use-case for the folder, different settings may be applied as well. In addition, we also start monitoring the system so we can notify you of issues if they arise. The HexOS Command Deck is responsible for all of this and more.

Reliability and Access

After setup, your home server will run, even in the rare case of a service disruption to the HexOS Command Deck. Your data, applications, and VMs will be accessible to devices over your local network, reliably protected by TrueNAS and ZFS. In an emergency, local admin access is always available through the TrueNAS UI and CLI. The user has the simplicity of HexOS with the power of enterprise-grade TrueNAS always available.

Features of HexOS

The HexOS approach allows for many powerful features, including:

• Anywhere management access. Manage from anywhere, using any device, over any network connection.
• Monitoring and notifications. Email and SMS notifications built-in.
• Live platform updates. New features just appear over time and with OS updates.
• Automations, workflows, and orchestration. Simplified storage, apps, VMs, server-to-server sync, and more.

Be the First to Join the HexOS Community

HexOS users are also invited to participate in our community via our forums where you can collaborate, get advice, and support. Great places to discuss hardware, workflows, and upcoming HexOS improvements. Sign up for our newsletter below to be notified when they and the upcoming beta are available.