general/other Which tools do you prefer for VM hosting (not jails) on FreeBSD?

Which tools do you prefer for VM hosting (not jails) on FreeBSD?

  • Bhyve (native)

    Votes: 9 37.5%

  • CBSD

    Votes: 2 8.3%

  • quBSD

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • iohyve

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • vm-bhyve

    Votes: 15 62.5%

  • VirtualBox

    Votes: 2 8.3%

  • Xen

    Votes: 1 4.2%

  • libvirt

    Votes: 1 4.2%

  • other

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • QEMU/KVM

    Votes: 1 4.2%
  • Total voters
    24
Not sure what you're looking to find out. VirtualBox is very easy to use. So is vm-bhyve, but it has some limitations, and it will depend upon what you want. If you want a VM just to play with, VirtualBox might be easiest. If you, like I do, need a couple of RH servers and a Windows install for work purposes, vm-bhyve is better for those, faster and less resource intensive. Those are the only two I've worked with on FreeBSD, but I'm sure that others will have more useful information for you. The big question, I think, is what is your purpose for the VMS, do you just need Windows for work, or are you planning to say, run a web server and keep it separate, etc. I think you'll get better answers if you can specify your purpose--but if you're not yet sure of your eventual aim, that'a alright too, a lot of us get started on various things out of idle curiosity and it leads on to other things--or just goes nowhere. :)
 
scottro said:
...VirtualBox is very easy to use. So is vm-bhyve, but it has some limitations, and it will depend upon what you want...If you, like I do, need a couple of RH servers and a Windows install for work purposes, vm-bhyve is better for those, faster and less resource intensive...
Click to expand...

Thanks, that's exactly the kind of info about tradeoffs I'm looking for. I'm also just curious about what people commonly use.

I'm currently running only jailed applications on my server, but I would also like to run some Windows VMs for testing and at least one Linux server for occasional Docker usage.
 
For Windows, I'd recommend vm-bhyve, it runs much better than VirtualBox's Windows. There's a nice quickstart guide on the vm-bhyve git page. One thing they leave out is that if you use the default Windows template, you have to add bhyve_options="-A" at the end of the file. Its documentation, though it has a wiki, is a bit sparse. I haven't gotten sound in Windows, though I didn't try, but I think vermaden has. (His blog also has some useful vm-bhyve stuff, if I remember correctly.
For Linux, if you don't need a GUI, it's great. Use grub as the bootloader, and you can either ssh into it from your local host or use vm console <vmname>. If you need a GUI it's a little trickier, depending upon which distribution you're using. For example, Debian, Devuan, or Arch will require some tricks that I haven't seen documented on the github pages, to get it to boot consistently, you have to use uefi boot, etc.
Hopefully, someone with more knowledge will chime in. I have a Windows install for a couple of work things that require windows, and a few RedHat installs, as well as a couple of other Linux installs, but mostly I just use those for fun.
 
Let me expose my opinion. VirtualBox is for Windows. It does very well its job for that OS. I use it daily.
Speaking about FreeBSD, it's better to use software around bhyve like vm-bhyve (or others).

Once you get acquainted with bhyve, you can use it natively. And that's the best choice as it's integrated in the base system and you will not depend anymore of any software about this.
 
My mistake; the forum won't let me edit poll options once they've been added to remove the string "/KVM". I'm looking for software that runs well on FreeBSD to host Windows, Linux, and BSD guest VMs. Out of curiosity, has anyone here used libvirt to manage VMs hosted using QEMU or Bhyve on FreeBSD?
 
Well there's no "qemu/kvm" under FreeBSD as it was said few mins ago. I do use qemu a lot although nowadays I moved most of my qemu boxes to Linux.
For other purposes I use VirtualBox. But it's not because I had a choice back in the day (well, vmware3 used to be in ports many years ago).

bhyve really didn't "click with me".
 
ccammack said:
Out of curiosity, has anyone here used libvirt to manage VMs hosted using QEMU or Bhyve on FreeBSD?
Click to expand...
Absolutely. I never got PCI passthrough working though. XML is not my forte.

forums.freebsd.org

bhyve - Getting virt-manager to use bhyve

I'd like to use Bhyve from virt-manager since its supposed to support Bhyve, but when I open it I'm greeted with the following: Could not detect a default hypervisor. Make sure the appropriate QEMU/KVM virtualization packages are installed to manage virtualization on this host. I can also try...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org

forums.freebsd.org

bhyve pci passthrough

I just wasted some time on trying to get pci-passthrough to work. I tried a lot, and configured the stuff according to the wiki. pciconf -lv shows ppt1@pci0:3:0:0: class=0x020000 card=0x00008086 chip=0x150c8086 rev=0x00 hdr=0x00 vendor = 'Intel Corporation' device = '82583V...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org
 
Does bhyve allows to create VM's with bridge on WiFi? VirtualBox supposedly allows this. With QEMU the hack is assigning the MAC of the WiFi to the bridged interface.
 
rbranco said:
Does bhyve allows to create VM's with bridge on WiFi? VirtualBox supposedly allows this.
Click to expand...
There's no way this could be just "allowed" because the issue is with wifi itself, in the standard "managed" mode, it can only work with one MAC address per station. You would need some WDS mode for your wifi instead.

I don't know whether this works with FreeBSD, it certainly requires support on the access point side as well, and IIRC there are incompatible implementations ... I'd really opt to do everything on the routing layer instead, much simpler.
 
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