FreeBSD as VM host OS?

[Jonathan Horne]

On Monday 18 December 2006 19:47, Garrett Cooper wrote:
> This is assuming that you have APM setup though on the client OS? I
> agree though, vmware is a good product in Windows / Linux. Too bad they
> don't directly support FreeBSD though.
> -Garrett

well, the freebsd guests install just as normally as any real machine.  it 
even recognized the ACPI without any trouble.  the vmware-tools install a 
daemon that listens to commands from the host, and will reboot (kinda like 
ctrl-alt-del on the console) or poweroff the guest via buttons on the remote 
console, or by rebooting/shutting down the host.

i will note, that the freebsd tools need a quick patch (whipped up by someone 
who appears to be a vmware employee, from the vmware forums) to completly 
acpi-poweroff the guests.  this patch:

--- vmware-tools.sh.bak Mon Sep 11 11:36:27 2006
+++ vmware-tools.sh     Wed Nov  1 13:09:47 2006
@@ -609,6 +609,7 @@
 # Start the guest OS daemon
 vmware_start_guestd() {
   cd "$vmdb_answer_SBINDIR" && "$vmdb_answer_SBINDIR"/vmware-guestd \
+    --halt-command "/sbin/shutdown -p now" \
     --background "$GUESTD_PID_FILE"
 }

does the trick.  (changes the command that the daemon issues from 'shutdown 
now' to shutdown -p now').

my email, web, and 2 dns servers, are all virtual machines running on a single 
linux host.  they run fantastic, and i couldnt be more pleased with their 
performance.

cheers,
jonathan