How can I implement true vps with FreeBSD as a host?

[Adam Vande More]

On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 5:35 PM, Da Rock <
freebsd-questions at herveybayaustralia.com.au> wrote:

> On 01/01/11 02:34, Martes G Wigglesworth wrote:
>
>> Thanks in advance, for any input.
>>
>>  Have you checked into Xen specifically and how it works? I think you're
> where I was at a while ago, and a little investigation will change your
> mind. FWIW Xen is a hypervisor, and platforms need to be able to run in it,
> not the other way around. Have a read up on it anyway.
>

Well yes Xen is a hypervisor, a type 1 and your OS needs to be specifically
modified to run as a Dom0 or a paravirtualized DomU.

What you want I think is something like VirtualBox- comparatively slower,
> but about the best for what it is.


Whatever that means.  Vbox is just as fast as Xen for most applications give
or take a little depending on what you're doing.  About the only place Xen
can beat out Vbox is with in networking performance with a guest using the
virtio driver, however since I've not tested the newer Vbox which is
supposed to better performance there.  It's pretty hard to get accurate
meaningful benchmarks across a variety of hosts/guests/usage styles, but
generally speaking Xen, KVM, and Vbox are in the same performance league
despite the differences in hypervisors(Vbox and KVM are fairly similar
here).  VBox guests may also have significantly better IO performance.


Xen's advantage now days lies in it's pci-pass-through support and all the
tools built for using/managing it.  I think KVM may have pci pass-through
support too, but haven't messed with it.  A lot of the tools support is more
abstracted as well with things like libvirt.

I like Vbox on FreeBSD for several reasons, but one of the main benefits is
using ZVOL's as the storage backend.  You get a lot of the ZFS goodies in
your VM that way.  You can create scripts to automate your functions,
everything done in the GUI can be done in the CLI and more.

http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch08.html


-- 
Adam Vande More