# Virtualization on top of FreeBSD



## susannej (May 8, 2014)

Dear forum,

We have several servers in our company, currently mainly based on Debian-Linux and one Windows 2008 Server. The current Linux-servers are for web, mail, mailarchive, fileserver, faxserver.

My plan for the future is now, to exchange as much server as possible with FreeBSD and reduce the hardware to a minimum, but the mailserver has to be Linux (because of open-xchange) and the Windows 2008 Server should still be Windows in the future.
I thought of using FreeBSD for the main-server with fax and fileserver as jails (web and mail is in the DMZ) and run a virtualization for the linux-mailarchive and for the Windows-server.
(Hope, that I can make me understand... :r )

Which virtualization method could you recommend?
BHyve is a brand new thing and does not currently support Windows...
Maybe VirtualBox, but than I have to run a graphical desktop on the host...

I tend to the latter, but maybe there are other options? (I haven't tried VirtualBox for a production environment, hope it's stable enough...)

Thanks in advance,
Susanne.


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## SirDice (May 8, 2014)

susannej said:
			
		

> Maybe virtualbox, but than I have to run a graphical desktop on the host...


Virtualbox can be build "headless" i.e. without a graphical interface.


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## susannej (May 8, 2014)

SirDice said:
			
		

> Virtualbox can be build "headless" i.e. without a graphical interface.



Oh, that sounds good! 
Thanks for that, I'll have to google a bit - I think... 

Thanks,
susanne.


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## storvi_net (May 10, 2014)

There is a very nice PHP-Frontend for it http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpvirtualbox/

Regards
Markus


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## zodias (May 16, 2014)

Hi,

I am using VirtualBox on top of FreeBSD for video surveillance since 2008.

You will want to get familiar with 
`$ VBoxManage internalcommands`
options if you plan to give your VM Guests raw access to hard drives.

And you will want CPU(s) with VT-x and VT-d support.


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## ManaHime (May 17, 2014)

If it wasn't for the windows server I'd suggest giving bhyve a try
I've heard that performances are really good with it   

(Not sure how long until bhyve supports windows or if you can/want to wait for that particular server but that's just my 2 cents


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## susannej (Jul 10, 2014)

Hi!

Thanks a lot for all your answers, even if my question is nearly two months old. :r 

The "problem" might become actual again, but now I have a few things to look for. Thanks for the information and the links!

Thanks a lot!
Susanne.


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## Oko (Jul 10, 2014)

I would use Jails for everything you can run on FreeBSD and use RedHat+KVM to virtualize non FreeBSD instances. Unfortunately apart of vulnerable VirtualBox FreeBSD has nothing in terms of virtualization. I personally just migrated everything from VirtualBox to KVM.


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