Has anybody here run *BSD as a virtualization host?

Not_Oles · January 2023

FreeBSD has bhyve as a virtualization host. I was just reading "23.6.3. Creating a Linux® Guest" at https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/virtualization/ and I wonder, has anybody here tried a *BSD virtualization host? Thanks!

bliss · January 2023

When I was in school, the assistant professor said that BSD-like are the most secure modern OS.
So I wanted to tried it out, installing one of BSD variants on my laptop, but when I did, I realized that BSDs are mainly for servers, and there lacks some pre-compiled software in the official repositories.

Of course people can install a BSD flavour for personal use though. And I like *BSD for the elegance.

Not_Oles · January 2023

In case anybody might be interested, here is Part V. Virtualization and emulation of the NetBSD of The NetBSD Guide.

Not_Oles · January 2023

@bliss said:
When I was in school, the assistant professor said that BSD-like are the most secure modern OS.
So I wanted to tried it out, installing one of BSD variants on my laptop, but when I did, I realized that BSDs are mainly for servers, and there lacks some pre-compiled software in the official repositories.

Of course people can install a BSD flavour for personal use though. And I like *BSD for the elegance.

Hey @bliss! It's great that you tried BSD! Congrats! Trying stuff is good! I used to use NetBSD because it ran on different architectures. It's been long enough that I don't remember well, but NetBSD ran on my Intel 586, an old pre-Intel Apple, and an IBM z50 laptop. Of course, this was before virtualization became a thing.

bliss · January 2023

It's embarrassing that I only installed FreeBSD within VirtualBox for less than 1 hour, then gave up, and removed everything.
It's just because (personal humble opinion) GNU/Linux is more suitable for desktop use, I mean most open source software have its Linux distribution (deb, rpm, snap, ...), yet *BSD may lack some in the official repositories.
This is not a disadvantage, just like Debian lacks cutting-edge software. Stability is one of key factors when deploy servers.

By the way, after getting used to command line package managers in Unix-like OS, I think searching, installing, updating open source software with just one command line really liberates me from Windows control panel Spaghetti.
I mean Windows is newbie-friendly: just click and click. But when something goes wrong, like network failure, all users have is a "try to fix the network", then a waiting circle rounding and rounding for about 2 minutes, finally prompts a failure box.
I don't remember the source and exact words, but

When the programmers have pre-plannings, then Windows can do most things with one key click; but
When something unpredictable happens, Windows can do nothing about it, while Unix-like OS (even in the worst conditions) offer its users a chance to fix it.

My experience of Windows started from XP and stopped at Windows 7, so Windows may get better in recent years. Actually I had used Win 10 for less than 1 week in work, and it's great that most settings are searchable in the search-box.

If one day in the future, I deploy a service for public use, I may consider *BSD as an option. But before that, I should read the documentation too. Before my reading "The Linux Command Line", I just clicked and clicked in Gnome DE, yet after reading it, a WM like i3 and a terminal will suffice.

"Read the Fucking Manual", now I start to know the meaning.

cmeerw · January 2023

Not as a host, just had a look at the NetBSD 10 beta on the free Oracle Cloud Ampere instance (AArch64) after I finally managed to get it running there (just testing their wireguard implementation... NetBSD Problem Report #57161)

havoc · January 2023

Actively avoid it tbh. Heard bhyve has good performance though

SGraf · January 2023

Two years ago I did experiment a bit with virtualization on freebsd (12.0/12.1), as i was considering developing a virtualization management panel.
I enjoy like using freebsd for projects, so i figured that using it as a hypervisor should be a pretty decent experience.

The docs made it appear like it should be an easy/smooth ride. But at least back then it really wasn't that nice to work with. Normally the docs are excellent (https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/) - but as this was quite active in development it was all over the place. If you look at the length of the docs compared to the other two options (virtualbox and xen) then you'll see what i mean https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/virtualization/#virtualization-host-bhyve . So if you need any more than the short paragraph with the example (such as booting a windows guest, or different distributions or ...) then off to google you go to find some presentations from conferences containing examples on how to solve stuff (not that all of that worked as expected as well).
Anyway, after getting over the initial roadblocks - i decided to abandon the idea and wait for things to become more mature.

Your other two alternatives on freebsd for virtualisation are xen and virtualbox. While i haven't tried the former in combination with freebsd, i would caution you to avoid the latter, as virtualbox only works with specific releases of freebsd (ie:12.3) so if you are not super cautious on upgrading the host, your vm's wont start.

tldr: Freebsd as a vm host with bhyve wasnt the usual awesome experience. I still love using/deploying freebsd for projects.

rcy026 · January 2023

I love BSD and has been active in the community for over 25 years and I advocate it wherever I can.
But why would you use it as a virtualization host? What do you expect to gain?
I am a firm believer in using the right tools for every job, and I really wish I could say different, but BSD just isn't the right tool for virtualization.

webcraft · January 2023

I have been using it to host linux guests for game servers. It's very stable but setup is a pain. It delivers about the best performance I could measure among the five main virtualization solutions (vmware, xen, lxd, kvm, bhyve), that's why I chose it. However, updating the hypervisor sometime later was just as much pain as setting it up. It's really just as good as long as it's running "as it is". At this point I decided to switch to Xen which delivered about the same performance (insignificantly less, just like vmware but vmware was too expensive) and Xen is a lot easier to administrate nowdays.
I've read freebsd improved the updating part to automatic updates but it still requires some more manual effort to get it running right. Most easy to deploy and manage is kvm and lxd ofc (just install Proxmox) but it's having the most overhead (or more restrictions like lxd). For shared virtualization environments I wouldn't recommend bhyve but to run certain dedicated stuff (like crm, billing or hr management) which requires lots of performance constantly and isn't touched too often, it's great. There's a web panel for bhyve made by a russian freebsd community but it's not really improving useability and has several bugs/translation issues (at least at the time I tested it). There's no such nice things like Proxmox or vSphere for bhyve afaik.

Not_Oles · January 2023

Thanks to everyone who has posted.

Here are a few links for anyone who might be interested:

OpenBSD native Virtual Machine
https://oriented.net/server/openbsd-virtual-machine

How to install Linux VM on FreeBSD using bhyve and ZFS
https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-install-linux-vm-on-freebsd-using-bhyve-and-zfs/

Has anybody here run *BSD as a virtualization host?

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