FreeBSD 12.1 hypervisor management tools

[David P. Discher]

This pop’ed up in my inbox when I was searching for something else … but by far, your best solution will be XOA

 - https://xen-orchestra.com

Not specifically “not” freebsd … it’s complicated enough to deploy via NPM or yarn or whatever - I’d recommend starting with their appliance.  I’m running XCP-ng, with XOA control.  You can have multiple XOAs controller your clusters, so you can run their linux packaged VM, while working on getting it to run under freebsd, if desired. 

All the other tool listed in this thread are incomplete and when I was last evaluating, about 6 month ago, where missing too many key features.

I am not using FreeBSD as Dom0 - but using it as the backing NAS OS. And running a mix of CentOS and FreeBSD VMs.  A few years  ago, I test FreeBSD Dom0 … and still needed a lot of work to be production ready … as I the other thread in Xen in Feb 2020, from Brian … 'abysmal network performance’ … and I believe disk IO was piss poor too.

If you are all FreeBSD, or mostly FreeBSD VMs … bhyve and vm-bhyve are nice, but no GUI. (if you don’t require more than 1Gbps network performance ).  There was some, somewhat secret work on full VPS (virtual private server) kernel work, that got near (90-95%) theoretical hardware performance on Disk and Net IO, but I’m not sure if that was every merged or released publicly.   It was planned to be publicly merged … but not sure where that project went. (This work be helpful for Xen too ??) 

I also implemented iSCSI + FreeNAS API into vm-bhyve a few years ago,

 - https://github.com/daviddpd/vm-bhyve/blob/freenas-iscsi/README-ISCSI.md  

(make sure you are on the freenas-iscsi branch) - and the corresponding API ...

 - https://github.com/daviddpd/ixnas-api

But these are a few years out of date and may need work.  Though, in the bhyve+iSCSI - the awesome thing is that each virtual disk was a raw block device mapped to the VM, as a iSCSI LUN, provisioned as a ZFS zvol (on the remote NAS via the API). “Cloning” is done on the ZFS side.  With Xen+XOA, the only two SR (storage repositories) are NFS and iSCSI+LVM.  And each hypervisor makes a single NFS or iSCSI mount.  Then each Virtual disk is managed as a .vhd on NFS.  With iSCSI+LVM, then the iSCSI LUN is managed with LVM, and formatted with ext3(4?) or xfs, and the .vhd is keep as a file in that logical volume. Thin provisioning not available with iSCSI on XOA/XCP. Thin provisioning/snapshots on NFS done with features of .vhd in XOA/XCP. With my iSCSI+vm-bhyve, then thin provisioning, snapshots and cloning are done in ZFS, on the NAS side, not in the Dom0. 

These are the only supported options in XOA - though Xen can likely do other things, they are implemented for easy of use in the Web UI.  Ideally I’d love to implement my iSCSI+ZFS for Xen and into XOA. 

--
David P. Discher 
https://davidpdischer.com/


> On Jan 4, 2020, at 9:32 AM, Stefan Parvu <sparvu at kronometrix.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> We got a new server, where we plan to install FreeBSD 12.1 amd64 and use Xen. 
> Is there anything we could use as GUI management tools for Xen on FreeBSD ?
> 
> Im looking for some graphical user interface management software to allow different people to create/manage 
> different VMs on top of Xen/FreeBSD. 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Stefan Parvu
> sparvu at kronometrix.org
> 
> 
> 
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