Virtualizing FreeBSD...

[Mark Felder]

On Mon, Jul 29, 2013, at 13:51, Florian Heigl wrote:
> - VMWare ESXi
> This is what I have also tried. I'm quite sure I have had the
> e1000/vmxnet autoswitching working fine and the overall experience was
> just fine.
> No bugs, no troubles.
> The platform is perfectly robust and plays nice with FreeBSD (what I'm
> trying to say: You can completely skip worrying about platform issues)
> 

I completely disagree. I've even started a ridiculously long thread
about FreeBSD's nonstop crashing on VMWare ESXi. We moved to entirely
new hardware, rebuilt the VMs from scratch, new SANs, different ESXi
versions, etc. Never fixed it. VMWare kept saying "not a bug" and
refused to support FreeBSD, even though they claim to.



> I've now also inherited management of a medium sized platform running
> FreeBSD on ESXi, some 45 VMs I guess.
> What I notice there is disk throughput being not great and disk IO
> latency feels abysmal, especially to someone used PV Xen VMs.
> 
> My tinderboxes run around 2 days for under 1500 packages.
> 
> I suspect that my own servers are a bit more powerful than what's under
> those VMs.
> Still, often it's wiser to have a physical, super-responsive FreeBSD box
> with jails than many tiny but not snappy FreeBSD VMs on VMWare.
> 
> Pro sides I didn't mention, for VMWare:
> - Page sharing will be easier to use than in Xen (and HyperV just went to
> a corner, crying)
> - Snapshots, stuff like VEEAM, VAAI, or better Filer-side snapshots on
> NFS and freezing the VM is aeons ahead of XenServer (imho)
> - HA really exists, if you afford it. (XenServer HA exists but the scope
> differs)
> 
> 
> That brings me to the last points, lessons learned:
> - Alignment: 
> For all I can tell stock 9.x FreeBSD hasn't gotten the news about disk
> alignment, meaning you need to invest some time to fix that, or you would
> waste a lot of your performance.
> - Avoid optimized CFlags if you go with XenServer, or you might run into
> bad surprises i.e. if you change your hardware platform.
> I ended up needing to recompile for AMD on the old server before being
> able to move to new hosts.
> VMWare would have just run GENERIC and never have caused me that trouble
> in the first place.
> 
> 
> 
> Greetings,
> Florian
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