I didn’t know about Bhyve, thanks for that. Your content is awesome, very well explained and detailled. Keep it up! By the way, what browser were you using in the video?
Thanks for putting together this interesting video. I've been running byhve VM's on TrueNAS for at least 5 years and I didn't realize how extensive the capabilities are. I looked at it as a cheap VE to host a few home servers running Linux. It has many more features than I knew were there. There really isn't much information on byhve so I would like to see your content and scripts that may make it more useful and secure. I'm not afraid of a little scripting either. I like the thought of using scripts to automate and rebuild jails and VMs.
Thanks for this. Last time I looked, Bhvye didn’t support live migration of VMs. Is that still the case, especially using shared storage? The setup you described here is an interesting alternative to shared storage. Thanks!
I was under the impression Bhyve development had stalled but apparently I was wrong. It looks magnificent, I'll have to give it a try ASAP. Does it support SPICE?
P.S.: I'd be interested to see the basics of the configuration you used in this presentation. I'd also much appreciate a slide on the differences between today's Bhyve and KVM, as well as between the networking capabilities you outlined and, say, OpenvSwitch. Overall, nice work.
Never heard of SmartOS before (didn't try any Illumos variant either), but now I'll have to spin it up in my lab. Thank you for a suggestion and another sleepless night :)
@@GatewayITTutorials I should mention that SmartOS runs in memory. If you prefer a disk based OS, have a look at OmniOS CE. It's also pretty good, but does not have the ease-of-use toolset found in SmartOS
Hi, I'm a bit late but I just found this video. Your's is a fantastic presentation and I was looking for a Proxmox replacemente and I'm going to try out bhyve
Very well thought out and presented. I would like to see a video that thoroughly discusses vCPUs, cores, and threads and how the system tunables are set to match the hardware (hw.vmm.topology.cores_per_package and hw.vmm.topology.threads_per_core). You touched on it in this video and I have seen many forum posts about this subject, but it has not been treated and defined thoroughly that gives me a clear understanding of how to use them.
They are only used in case Bhyve doesn't work out of the box (or unless you have a very specific usecase to assign multiple threads per core). Because in my experience multi socket systems don't work out of the box, and you need to set both of these tunables to a number that will let VM start, that's pretty much it. Keep in mind, that windows server treats every thread as a core in this case, so the licensing can get ridiculously expensive.
I'd ask for a comparison between this and KVM (which is my favorite for virtualization,even of I'm just using other people's scripts) but I'm a (dumb) mostly desktop user and alot of this goes over my head already.
i believe you maybe mixing Fast Clone (which is just a delta copy with a base image reference -WITH- Full Clone which is block level. For obvious reasons block replication will take slightly longer where as fast or delta should be almost instant in any hypervisor as there is nothing to copy over.
you might enjoy something like alias vmstart='vm start $(vm list | fzf | cut -d " " -f1)' - could easily tweak this to be much richer as well. For example a function called v that issues vm $1 and uses the $1 value to decide what command to pass into fzf for matching.
Nice one) I didn't know about fzf, it's really cool) We could also use this, to exclude the first line "NAME, DATASTORE, LOADER" and so on, and then exclude already running VMs: vm list | grep -v NAME | grep -v Running | fzf | awk '{print $1}' EDIT: wow, bro, thank you so much) I've just made 5 new scripts to ease VM management for my staffers, using FZF: vm-generate-cloudinit vm-clone vm-start vm-stop vm-kill
@@GatewayITTutorials Don't get me wrong, I liove awk and would probably use it by force of habit at the command line. I do prefer a focused tool like cut over an entire programming language when I am making a specific solution like an alias or script though. To get rid of the first line, maybe consider tail -n +2 - just to avoid the problem that the grep intermingles content concern with layout concern, e.g. can't see any VMs with the string NAME in their name. Same kind of reasoning, my instinct would be grep -v at the command line but like more precision when making a tool. btw thanks for the informative video, looking forward to learning more in this space.
This has been a problem for some time now. However with the increasing use of ssd drives I find myself not using suspend to ram at all these days even on machines that fully support it. Horses for courses I guess.
most hypervisor are not fully functional from the web interface.. yes proxmox I am looking at you ;) ..but I like it in the CLI more anyway, containers are a good thing, but working with jails, at least from what I understand, will accomplish the same with even more security. bad support with multi processor platforms is a said thing though, could you give me an idea where you got that from? last but not least I might to add, that people are already on their limits sometime and just do not feel comfortable with BSD
I had this multiprocessor issue myself (but only with windows 10/windows server), with an older HP G7 server (it might have been a motherboard support issue tho). Anyway, I can't test it now, because I sold it.
@@GatewayITTutorials right I see.. So actually the problem occurred in the guest rather than with the scheduling on the host? I do not really have any experience anymore with MS Server (last familiar product was server 2003 and back the running vms was more for testing if even) ..also wasn't aware that win10 supports more than one processor :D
Yes, you can absolutely run Windows VMs on Bhyve, but it's limited only to modern Windows OSes. I also had a problem on HP G7 enterprise server (DL360 I think), where linux and bsd VMs would start just fine, but Windows VMs would freeze on the install screen. Always test before going to production :)
I am working on my own Bhyve manager: github.com/yaroslav-gwit/PyVM-Bhyve It's in Alfa state at this point, have a look if you are interested. But there is a mature and active project called CBSD (just Google: Bhyve CBSD).
Continue, bhyve is great and marketing, ads, and great web interfaces doesn't make the quality of the tool. It makes just seems it to be easier to use. But you can't see what it really does. Then I don't believe that containers are the future. Their lightness, offers a lot of flexibility. But their isolation is tricky. The kernel you emulate offers a better isolation. With this speed, bhyve has his place. Imo it's a great challenger. Today we talk about terraform, api etc... But all these technologies have proven their limits when OVH datacenter burnt in France. A zfs dataset has a great recoverability. Know the thing is, people like you should talk about it. Because, how late it is (arm will come maybe late but It will come) just talking about it as you do will make it more visible and people will have interests on it. And couple it with jails is imo the future. Not giving one tool the power (see windows or IBM...)
This week I am working on a video: Raspberry Pi as a router under FreeBSD, and maybe the following week I'll cover the installation of Bhyve, encrypted ZFS datasets, my helper scripts and so on.
I'll answer all of your 3 questions at once :) FreeBSD is rarely used as a desktop, because of many reasons: graphics drivers are absent or outdated, limited amount of desktop software available, hard to configure audio, etc etc. It is mostly used as a server, with which you can achieve huge uptimes: years or even decades. Yes, graphics mode in bhyve is only supported if you use UEFI, but that's an upside in my opinion anyway, because MBR doesn't support disks larger than 2TB.
@@GatewayITTutorials But the Intel and Nvidia have satisfactory support, like proper accelerated one, on which I could play 3d games. For Audio I had to use Pulseaudio for Englithenment and noticed that even XFCE 4.16 on 12.x has pulseaudio plugin. Virtualbox supports graphics regardless of whether it is MBR/UEFI. :)
Yes, that's true :) But unfortunately Virtual Box is horrible when it comes to clustering/VM migration, or CloudInit support for that matter. Any tool has it's own downsides :)
