Virtualization Options for Xeon Nehalem

Rasaki Temidire

Rasaki Temidire

Hello,

I installed FreeBSD 11-STABLE on an old HP z600 workstation and wanted to run bhyve to kick off some virtual machines. Alas it turns out that my Xenon X5560 processors don't have the Unrestricted Guest (UG) feature needed to run bhyve. Any suggestions for (para/hyper) virtualization aside from VirtualBox? Thought about Xen but running Dom0 but it sounds like I might as well just run it on Linux. I'd rather stay in the FreeBSD.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
 
You can still use bhyve for virtualization, but you are restricted to using only 1 vCPU per VM.
You could try smartOS which uses KVM/QEMU for full hardware virtualization, which doesn't need VMX for more than one vCPU (but sacrificing performance) and also supports bhyve since its last release.

Regardless of what hypervisor you use, don't expect miracles in terms of VM performance - this dinosaur CPU is in the performance range of a current core i3 or small Xeon D-1518 (while burning approx. 3x the power...). This might be OK for some light testing, but might be frustrating if you want to get real work done.
Depending on your use case you might be better of using OS-based virtualization, which would be Jails on FreeBSD or Zones on smartOS/illumos.
 
Thanks for the input sko. I had tried installing OpenIndiana and playing around with kvm/qemu and zones. The performance wasn't that bad for what I was doing. I just didn't like the fact that illumos doesn't have kms support for my radeon CAYMAN card. The dual xeon x5560s seemed powerful enough to run a few virtual machines decently for playing around and learning a bit.
 
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