Those who were present at BSDCan 2011 have probably seen or heard about the unveling of BHyVe, the native hypervisor for FreeBSD. FreeBSD is very much lacking virtualization features (not counting jails) and this is in any case excellent news for the project! Interested users are now invited to test it!
Category Archives: Virtualization
Call for testing the BSD Hypervisor (BHyVe)
Those who were present at BSDCan 2011 have probably seen or heard about the unveling of BHyVe, the native hypervisor for FreeBSD. FreeBSD is very much lacking virtualization features (not counting jails) and this is in any case excellent news for the project! Interested users are now invited to test it!
Update on Jail Based Virtualization Project
One of the proposals selected for funding earlier this year was for jail based virtualization. Bjoern Zeeb, the developer being funded, recently provided an update on the progress of this project:
Bjoern A. Zeeb has been awarded a grant to improve FreeBSD's jail based virtualization infrastructure and to continue to work on the virtual network stack. His employer, CK Software GmbH is matching the Foundation's funding with hours.
FreeBSD has been well known for its jail based virtualization during the last decade. With the import of the virtual network stack, FreeBSD's operating system level virtualization has reached a new level.
This project includes cleanup of two years of import work and development and, more notably, brings the infrastructure for a network stack teardown. Cleanly shutting down a network stack in FreeBSD will be the major challenge in the virtualization area to get the new feature to production ready quality for the 9.x release
lifecycle.
Further, the project includes generalization of the virtual network stack framework, factoring out common code. This will provide an infrastructure and will ease virtualization of further subsystems like SYSV/Posix IPC with minimal overhead. All further virtualized subsystems will immediately benefit from shared debugging facilities, an essential feature for early adopters of the new technology.
Improved jail based virtualization support, that continues to be very lightweight and as easily manageable as classic jails, will be a killer feature for the next few years. It will allow people to partition their FreeBSD server, run simulations
without racks of hardware, or provide thousands of virtual instances in hosting environments fairly easy and efficiently. While this follows the trend of green computing, it also adds to FreeBSD's virtualization portfolio with Xen or other more heavyweight hypervisor support, which can be mixed with jails as needed.
While work in this area will have to continue, the funding for this project will end mid-July 2010.
Bjoern A. Zeeb has been awarded a grant to improve FreeBSD's jail based virtualization infrastructure and to continue to work on the virtual network stack. His employer, CK Software GmbH is matching the Foundation's funding with hours.
FreeBSD has been well known for its jail based virtualization during the last decade. With the import of the virtual network stack, FreeBSD's operating system level virtualization has reached a new level.
This project includes cleanup of two years of import work and development and, more notably, brings the infrastructure for a network stack teardown. Cleanly shutting down a network stack in FreeBSD will be the major challenge in the virtualization area to get the new feature to production ready quality for the 9.x release
lifecycle.
Further, the project includes generalization of the virtual network stack framework, factoring out common code. This will provide an infrastructure and will ease virtualization of further subsystems like SYSV/Posix IPC with minimal overhead. All further virtualized subsystems will immediately benefit from shared debugging facilities, an essential feature for early adopters of the new technology.
Improved jail based virtualization support, that continues to be very lightweight and as easily manageable as classic jails, will be a killer feature for the next few years. It will allow people to partition their FreeBSD server, run simulations
without racks of hardware, or provide thousands of virtual instances in hosting environments fairly easy and efficiently. While this follows the trend of green computing, it also adds to FreeBSD's virtualization portfolio with Xen or other more heavyweight hypervisor support, which can be mixed with jails as needed.
While work in this area will have to continue, the funding for this project will end mid-July 2010.
Tom’s FreeBSD blog » FreeBSD 2010-02-02 22:45:11
I’ve recently run into a problem with 7-STABLE on VMware ESXi 3.5u4. With a recent change my VM shuts off shortly after probing the LSI (mpt) disk controller. The same behavior started occurring over the summer in HEAD and the quick workaround is to change the VM’s disk controller type from LSI to BusLogic. Lately I have some time to poke people about this issue so I figured I would. The problem is getting as much as I can while booting and having some usable boot messages for someone to look at. This would usually be accomplished by redirecting console output to a serial port on the problem machine and hooking up a cross over cable between it and another box. I haven’t done this on VMware before though so I had to do a little googling and it’s pretty simple.
On the FreeBSD side the following needs to be added to /boot/loader.conf:
console=”vidconsole,comconsole”
This will redirect the console to both the video display and a serial port. Once that is done shutdown the VM so the serial port can be added and configured.
With the crashing VM turned off go to “Edit Settings”:
Click the “Add” button to add a serial port to the VM:
For the serial port output select “Connect to named pipe”:
Finally configure the pipe:
The name of the pipe should be a file location on the VM host machine, not the guest. The near end is “Server” since I want to see the output from this VM and the far end will be another virtual machine. For the VM I’ll be connecting from to view the console output I would do the same but near end would be “Client”.
Once all this is done, from the second working VM launch cu(1).
# cu -l cuad0
After that boot the crashing VM and kernel messages should appear on the second VM. That’s all it takes to setup a serial connection between two FreeBSD VMs on VMware.
Update: Images fixed.
How much performance do you lose with VMWare?
I finally have a VMWare ESX 4 (vSphere 4) in production and it's time to see how much we lost this time in the name of greater flexibility. In short: the usual (which is a lot).
The night of 1000 jails
As FreeBSD 8.0 is right around the corner it's the right time to get it some more exposure. Just for kicks I got the idea to stress the Jails subsystem - the cheap (both in $$$ and resource requirements) OS-level virtualization technology present in FreeBSD for nearly 10 years now. Behold... the bootup of 1,000, count them - 1,000 virtual machines on a single host with 4 GB of RAM.