Virtualization of FreeBSD

[Jonathan Horne]

On Wednesday 06 June 2007 19:11:16 Maxim Khitrov wrote:
> On 6/6/07, Sean Murphy <smurphy at calarts.edu> wrote:
> > Is anyone running virtualization of FreeBSD servers on VMware or other
> > virtualization software?  What experiences have you had, good or bad?
>
> At home I run have several FreeBSD installs running on Windows 2003
> VMWare Server. The only reason I'm doing this is because FreeBSD
> doesn't support my raid controller, so I'm stuck with windows.
>
> Overall it works fine. However, you do have terrible disk (and to a
> lesser extent network) performance. I use these installs mostly for
> developing and testing software, so it's not a big deal for me. Here
> are a few tips for getting the most out of a FreeBSD server on VMWare
> (this is for Windows only):
>
> - If you have enough memory, add prefvmx.minVmMemPct = "100" and
> prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize = "TRUE" to VMWare config.ini (App
> Data under All Users). That will keep all the VM memory in ram instead
> of swapping it to the disk. The rest of the settings go into your
> FreeBSD.vmx file.
>
> - Disable named memory file: mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"
>
> - Disable page sharing: sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"
>
> - Disable memory trimming: MemTrimRate = "0"
>
> - Be sure to use Intel gigabit network adapter: ethernet0.virtualDev =
> "e1000"
>
> In previous versions of VMWare Server you had to configure your
> kern.hz sysctl to be 100. Otherwise your clock would run very slow. I
> think they fixed it in the latest version, but just keep that in mind.
>
> Disk performance is quite bad. For example, doing a full extract of
> the ports tree takes my server around 16 minutes. On my old laptop
> with a crappy hard drive it takes only 8 or so minutes. So that's
> something to keep in mind, you're not going to be able to use VMs as a
> file server. For most other uses it works fine.
>
> - Max
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i too used to run 4 FreeBSDs in VMware server, they ran great for me, i ran 2 
DNS servers, an apache server, and a sendmail server.  performance was 
acceptable.  my VMware host was suse 10.1.

sean, you might also take a look at jails for freebsd.  conceptually, its a 
lot like virtualization, altho it does have its differences.  once you get 
your jails up and running, you really wouldnt know the difference, and 
performance is basically as fast as the host computer can go.

cheers,
-- 
Jonathan Horne
http://dfwlpiki.dfwlp.org
freebsd at dfwlp.com