FreeBSD 6.2 and VMWare ESX 3.x

[Uwe Laverenz]

On Thu, Sep 13, 2007 at 10:30:49PM +0200, Peter Boosten wrote:


> Does 6.2 still have that time- and ACPI issue in ESX3?

No.

> - disable ACPI in the VM

This is not necessary with ESX 3 and FreeBSD 6.2 at least.

> - kernel frequency at 100 hz

This is recommended, I'm not sure if it's really necessary. There is one
more setting on the ESX side that helps with timing problems (FreeBSD or
Linux guests): change "Advanced Settings/Misc/Misc.Timer/MinHardPeriod"
from 400 to 100. With "timing problems" I mean the guests system clock
running too fast/slow here. I had this problem with RHEL4 guests, this
setting fixed it for me.

> - the vmxnet-driver (even the one from workstation 6) crashes freebsd, but
> IIRC this driver can be replaced with e1000 in esx3.

I've never bothered with vmxnet, I use le(4) on i386 guests and em(4) on
amd64 guests. The only kernel module I found helpful is vmmemctl.ko.

The good news is that VMware releases "VMware Tools" as open source, I
hope this will improve the support for FreeBSD guests.

http://open-vm-tools.sourceforge.net/

Uwe