# Virtualising a FreeBSD server



## ilemur (May 4, 2014)

I have a headless home server which serves as a Network gateway and a ZFS file server + motion video surveillance through a bt878 PCI card. I hope to rebuilt the whole system on a Xeon e5 2620 + Supermicro X9DRL-3F board.

I am currently stuck on choosing the hypervisor which will fulfill all my needs.

1. I want to continue to run a RAID-Z on virtualised FreeBSD system with the maximum reliability in mind (all my family photos are there). So how secure is the disk passthrough on the Hyper-V? In case of failure of the virtual system will I be able to connect the RAID-Z array to a physical FreeBSD box and get my data back? What about performance of this solution?
In ESXi I could put an add-on LSI SAS2008 and pass it through to the FreeBSD box and it sound like the optimum solution. But with ESXI I am doubting i can run thin clients in my house to watch HDTV and games unlike Hyper-V with RemoteFX solutions.
2. Without the PCI passthrough capability I will not be able to present the bt878 card from hyper-v to FreeBSD box?


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## storvi_net (May 4, 2014)

Why do you want to virtualize the FreeBSD?
I tried virtualizing the "Storage-Device" several times and always come back to the other way: Storage = Host, the rest in VMs.

Regards
Markus


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## ilemur (May 5, 2014)

I would like to run several virtual machines including Win8 to switch to thin clients around the house. 

The best solution would be to run a separate box with FreeBSD and ZFS for storage but currently looking at the options to have an all-in-one server as I am trying to reduce the amount of hardware to keep an eye on. There is also an option to run a stage 2 hypervisor like VirtualBox on top of FreeBSD - but from my experience the performance is not that good.
With ESXi and a passthrough SATA card I really don't see any drawbacks. But personal choice is currently Hyper-V due to the RemoteFX and support for Software RAIDs which will ease up on the VM's storages (ZFS is for personal archive only).

So I am trying to understand if the Hyper-v's disc passthrough is a safe play.


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## storvi_net (May 5, 2014)

It should be possible to hand "down" the card to a VM (look @ INTEL for the VT-d - Feature of you CPU).

ESXi can be a way - I have no experience with it (played around 4 years ago) anymore.
XEN also can handle PCI passthrough (probably you can look @ XENSERVER?)

I like to install Virtualbox. It is sufficent for my usage - All daemons in Jails - Virtualbox for the rest.
There is an RDP-Server included, which also support RemoteFX for Windows Guests (look at the doc).
You also can prepare the machines at your local workstation and "teleport" this to the server. 

Regards
Markus


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