# FreeBSD virtualization survey



## Oko (Mar 21, 2015)

I have been a  non-voluntary virtualization user for over two years now. I inherited bunch of Red Hat machines with running VirtualBox as well as Debian Dom0 which is still running. In the mean time I migrated VirtualBox instances to Red Hat KVM running unsuccessfully for a brief period of time VirtualBox on FreeBSD. Recently I have been pushed to experiment with dockers. Having some working exposure of Jails the experience was awful.

I was wondering if somebody could give an overview of the current state of art of virtualization in FreeBSD world? I am curious to find out how long will it take for bhyve to become true production ready and how does it compare to KVM and Xen. I am also interested in status of FreeBSD Dom0 support for Xen. My original motivation for replacing VirtualBox with KVM was that KVM were part of Linux kernel and that Xen was removed from Red Hat few years ago. However Xen is probably the most widely used virtualization platform besides possibly  VMware ESXi.  Really I am interested in any serious evaluation papers on topic of virtualization.

Has anybody tried NetBSD Xen Dom0?


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## Beastie7 (Mar 21, 2015)

http://bhyvecon.org/bhyvecon2015-Peter.pdf


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## Oko (Mar 21, 2015)

Beastie7 said:


> http://bhyvecon.org/bhyvecon2015-Peter.pdf


Is this back ported to 10.1.1 or is it only in 11.0?  It sound based upon that paper that Bhyve is almost ready for prime time.


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## ronaldlees (Mar 26, 2015)

There's some pretty old info at:

https://wiki.freebsd.org/201309DevSummit/Virtualization

I wonder what your target requirements might be?  Is this a setup for other users in an admin capacity, or are you setting something up for a personal objective?


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## eldaemon (Apr 6, 2015)

Bhyve is in FreeBSD 10. I've used it minimally, but so far it has worked great.


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## Oko (Apr 6, 2015)

ronaldlees said:


> Is this a setup for other users in an admin capacity, or are you setting something up for a personal objective?


This is not for personal use.


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## jdakhayman (Apr 7, 2015)

I have an extremely noobish question, and I'm not being facetious, but why would I use Bhyve over jails? I understand that Bhyve is true machine vitalization. Unless my objective is to run other operating systems other than FreeBSD. I may have answered my own question, but would like some clarification. If there is any to be had.


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## tobik@ (Apr 7, 2015)

Ignoring other operating systems, you might for example want to run a different (older or newer) FreeBSD userland than your current FreeBSD version. With a jail you might run into problems when running it on an older/newer kernel. Also see this Thread different-freebsd-versions-on-host-and-jail.43015.


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## Beastie7 (Apr 7, 2015)

Or other BSD variants.


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## kpa (Apr 7, 2015)

tobik said:


> Ignoring other operating systems, you might for example want to run a different (older or newer) FreeBSD userland than your current FreeBSD version. With a jail you might run into problems when running it on an older/newer kernel. Also see this Thread different-freebsd-versions-on-host-and-jail.43015.



Newer userland with older kernel is not even guaranteed to work, the other way around is guaranteed to work with reservations.


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## jdakhayman (Apr 7, 2015)

Thanks for all the replies to my above question.


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