FreeBSD as VM host OS?

David Newman dnewman at networktest.com
Mon Dec 18 09:21:01 PST 2006


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On 12/18/06 8:32 AM, James Seward wrote:
> On 12/18/06, David Newman <dnewman at networktest.com> wrote:
>> "You really need <some other OS> as the host OS" is a perfectly valid
>> response too.
> 
> I run VMware Server on Ubuntu (one of the supported Linux host
> flavours, and the only one I'm prepared to put up with), hosting
> currently two Windows Server 2003 and two FreeBSD 6.x VMs on a Dell
> 1855 blade. While I haven't performed any benchmarks (benchmarks
> inside a VM are tricky to get right) I can report no noticable
> performance problems with the workload the machines have to handle.
> 
> The Windows machines are a small fileserver and a WSUS server; the
> FreeBSD machines are performing spam-assassination and NFS serving.
> 
> vmware1$ uptime
> 16:27:45 up 66 days,  5:17,  1 user,  load average: 0.27, 0.56, 0.54
> 
> I have a FreeBSD-based PXE server running in Workstation 5.5 on my
> desktop, and
> have had success running FreeBSD 4.x under ESX Server 2.5.x in a
> previous life.
> 

Thanks very much. I too have run FreeBSD as a guest OS under various
VMware flavors for years.

My question is whether FreeBSD is a suitable _host_ OS for any virtual
machine environment, preferably with support for SMP, amd64, and guest
OS speed at or close to native hardware speeds.

Thanks again!

dn

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