VM Options

[Robert Eckardt]

On Wed, 23 Jan 2008 14:23:16 -0500, Bill Moran wrote
> In response to Jack Barnett <jackbarnett at gmail.com>:
> > 
> > Are there any good VM Options for FreeBSD?
> > 
> > There is VMWare in ports; which I really like - but it's a few years old 
> > and still stuck on version 3 the last time I tried it.

It depends on what you want to do.
Do you want to run another OS (even a different FreeBSD release)?
Is it sufficient to prevent processes seeing each other? 

> VMWare on FreeBSD is a no-op.  Someone should really remove that port.

That's nonsense.
The current (very old) port is quite out-dated and it took me some time 
to get it running right e.g. with VMware 3 on FreeBSD 6.2. But it works!
In most (though not all) cases Xen is a useful alternative to VMware.
Of course Xen is driven by the Linux hype. All majors OS vendors support 
Xen.
When virtualization solutions find their way into next generation's CPUs 
Xen might take over VMware. Xen is still weak on the management side.

About a year ago rsync.net's 2007 code bounty called for a newer VMware 
port, but it's still in the state "currently in progress" (for half a 
year now).

> jail is your best option.  See the handbook for details and install the
> ezjail port to make it more manageable.  The drawback is that jail 
> can only run other FreeBSD instances in the VM.

Although jails are available far longer than zones in Solaris they have 
fallen behind. They lack a lot of features, e.g. no ressource management.
Even things that work in native FreeBSD don't work in jails. (ulimit)

> Next up would be qemu.  I use it a lot and it works a lot like 
> VMWare. The disadvantage to qemu is that it's really slow.

VMware burns quite a lot of CPU. QEMU is much worse.

> Down the list are a number of technologies in various stages of
> development, such as Xen.  I don't recommend any of them at this time
> unless you want to help with development.

It really depends on what you want to achieve.

Regards,
Robert

PS: People say, I sometimes tend to see things to negative.

--
Dr. Robert Eckardt    ---    Robert.Eckardt at Robert-Eckardt.de