So, my work surprise for a Thursday morning is an urgent requirement to see if we can run a set of FreeBSD machines under virtualised servers. I have not done this before personally, but I notice from post here that it doesnt seem uncommon, and I see Xen related commits flowing past, so I am guessing it is doable. So, for running 8 or 9 STABLE can anyone recommend which hypervisor works best, and is 8 or 9 better as the OS to run ? Am doing a bit of research myself, but nothing beats persoanl experience in these matters! cheers, -pete.
On 07/05/2012 01:43 PM, Pete French wrote:> So, my work surprise for a Thursday morning is an urgent requirement to > see if we can run a set of FreeBSD machines under virtualised servers. > I have not done this before personally, but I notice from post here > that it doesnt seem uncommon, and I see Xen related commits flowing > past, so I am guessing it is doable. > > So, for running 8 or 9 STABLE can anyone recommend which hypervisor > works best, and is 8 or 9 better as the OS to run ? Am doing a bit > of research myself, but nothing beats persoanl experience in these > matters! > > cheers, > > -pete.I have got some 8 and 9 STABLE servers running under KVM linux which works good with either ide or scsi drives and e1000 nics or the virtio drives and nics that use the virtio kernel modules from ports. I would recommend this. Also the free of charge vmware server 2 on linux is doing a good job for FreeBSD guests. But if you are going to choose a hypervisor on bare metal for FreeBSD guests, why not just run FreeBSD with jails? Disclaimer: http://www.ose.nl/email
On Jul 5, 2012, at 7:43 AM, Pete French <petefrench@ingresso.co.uk> wrote:> So, my work surprise for a Thursday morning is an urgent requirement to > see if we can run a set of FreeBSD machines under virtualised servers. > I have not done this before personally, but I notice from post here > that it doesnt seem uncommon, and I see Xen related commits flowing > past, so I am guessing it is doable. > > So, for running 8 or 9 STABLE can anyone recommend which hypervisor > works best, and is 8 or 9 better as the OS to run ? Am doing a bit > of research myself, but nothing beats persoanl experience in these > matters! > > cheers, > > -pete. > ____________________________Pete I am using VMware esxi v4.01 with no issues for 6, 7, 8 and 9 . Esxi will happily host amd64 installs and i386 provider the underlying hardware supports it. The older esx 3.5 works as well on 32bit hardware but I am no longer using it. Also I use virtualbox 4 hosted on a Mac and a 9-stable amd64 box with little issue . --- Mark saad | mark.saad@longcount.org
On Thu, 05 Jul 2012 13:43:06 +0200, Pete French <petefrench@ingresso.co.uk> wrote:> So, my work surprise for a Thursday morning is an urgent requirement to > see if we can run a set of FreeBSD machines under virtualised servers. > I have not done this before personally, but I notice from post here > that it doesnt seem uncommon, and I see Xen related commits flowing > past, so I am guessing it is doable. > > So, for running 8 or 9 STABLE can anyone recommend which hypervisor > works best, and is 8 or 9 better as the OS to run ? Am doing a bit > of research myself, but nothing beats persoanl experience in these > matters! > > cheers, > > -pete.Hi, It helps if you tell people what you are looking for. - realtime moving of guests between host-servers? - do you really need separate OS'es or would jails serve your purposes? - Are you only going to run FreeBSD on FreeBSD or also Linux or Windows on FreeBSD? - ... etc. Ronald.
Am Thu, 05 Jul 2012 12:43:06 +0100 schrieb Pete French <petefrench@ingresso.co.uk>:> So, my work surprise for a Thursday morning is an urgent requirement > to see if we can run a set of FreeBSD machines under virtualised > servers. I have not done this before personally, but I notice from > post here that it doesnt seem uncommon, and I see Xen related commits > flowing past, so I am guessing it is doable. > > So, for running 8 or 9 STABLE can anyone recommend which hypervisor > works best, and is 8 or 9 better as the OS to run ? Am doing a bit > of research myself, but nothing beats persoanl experience in these > matters!AFAIK, there are no VMware-tools for FreeBSD9 (yet). So, if you need to use ESXi/vSphere, then stay with 8.3 for the time being. There are KVM-drivers for FreeBSD 8.3 and 9.0 in the ports. Also, full, native support for MSFT-HyperV is coming to FreeBSD9. I wouldn'd bother with the free VMware-server. AFAIK, the latest vcenter has a web-console, so you don't need a Windows VM just to manage your virtualized FreeBSD instances. Hopefully, someone else will have to do all the heavy-lifting of maintaining all the virtualization-infrastructure.
On Thu, 05 Jul 2012 06:43:06 -0500, Pete French <petefrench@ingresso.co.uk> wrote:> So, my work surprise for a Thursday morning is an urgent requirement to > see if we can run a set of FreeBSD machines under virtualised servers. > I have not done this before personally, but I notice from post here > that it doesnt seem uncommon, and I see Xen related commits flowing > past, so I am guessing it is doable. > > So, for running 8 or 9 STABLE can anyone recommend which hypervisor > works best, and is 8 or 9 better as the OS to run ? Am doing a bit > of research myself, but nothing beats persoanl experience in these > matters! >I can't recommend ESX at all. We are struggling to keep our FreeBSD servers from crashing. I can make them crash on demand just by stressing I/O and network at the same time. I have a PR regarding the issue, but no known fix yet. http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=168416&cat=
Pete French (petefrench) writes:> So, my work surprise for a Thursday morning is an urgent requirement to > see if we can run a set of FreeBSD machines under virtualised servers. > I have not done this before personally, but I notice from post here > that it doesnt seem uncommon, and I see Xen related commits flowing > past, so I am guessing it is doable. > > So, for running 8 or 9 STABLE can anyone recommend which hypervisor > works best, and is 8 or 9 better as the OS to run ? Am doing a bit > of research myself, but nothing beats persoanl experience in these > matters!Have been running FreeBSD in production as a hypervisor and a guest under VirtualBox for a couple of years now. Am also running it under Ganeti/XEN and Ganeti/KVM with success. Note other comments in the thread about virtio. Setting KVM to use "native" io also helps quite a bit. Cheers, Phil
On 05/07/2012 14:21, Mark Saad wrote:> I am using VMware esxi v4.01 with no issues for 6, 7, 8 and 9 . Esxi will happily host amd64 installs and i386 provider the underlying hardware supports it. The older esx 3.5 works as well on 32bit hardware but I am no longer using it. Also I use virtualbox 4 hosted on a Mac and a 9-stable amd64 box with little issue .Hello, Which type of workload do you run on FreeBSD under VMWare ESXi? e.g. web server, database, e-mail...? -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 260 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/attachments/20120706/2c9f3aab/signature.pgp
On Thu, 2012-07-05 at 04:43 -0700, Pete French wrote:> So, my work surprise for a Thursday morning is an urgent requirement to > see if we can run a set of FreeBSD machines under virtualised servers. > I have not done this before personally, but I notice from post here > that it doesnt seem uncommon, and I see Xen related commits flowing > past, so I am guessing it is doable. > > So, for running 8 or 9 STABLE can anyone recommend which hypervisor > works best, and is 8 or 9 better as the OS to run ? Am doing a bit > of research myself, but nothing beats persoanl experience in these > matters! > > cheers, > > -pete.Just a few notes from clusteradm@ about this. I've been running a CentOS 5 machine with xen3 pretty successfully with PV 32 bit and 64 bit HVM vms for a while now. I install CentOS 5 and then go to the gitco repo here: http://www.gitco.de/repo/ Pretty straight forward stuff. I install the VMs in full HVM mode using VNC redirection and then switch them over to PV or HVM mode and setup serial consoles. If you have any questions, let me know. I can dump some of the configurations to help you out if you wish. Sean