available hypervisors in FreeBSD

[Peter Ross]

Hi all,

I read through an older threat I kept in my archive. It started like this:

On Wed, 1 Apr 2015, Udo Rader wrote:

> As far as my homework digging revealed, FreeBSD supports four hypervisors:
>
> * bhyve
> * KVM
> * QEMU
> * VirtualBox

.. and later Xen was mentioned.

I ask myself which of the solutions are most mature at the moment and 
immediately usable in production.

Reason is a potential company move from VMware ESXi/Centos(6/7) with some 
critical Windows 2008 and 2012 IIS/.NET applications) involved.

While most of open source may go into FreeBSD jails, we have a few 
CentOS6/7 boxes with proprietary software we have to keep, as well as the 
Windows VMs to maintain (there is a long term effort to move them to Open 
Source too but the final migration of all may be years away).

We may phase out ESXi gradually, or just keep it, depending on the 
performance and maturity of FreeBSD based solutions.

I have experience with Linux on VirtualBox and it worked well if the load 
was not high but the performance wasn't too good when under stress (but it 
never crashed, I might add).

Which of the solutions are worth testing? Do you have recommendations?

I am thinking of server software and "containerisation" only, so USB 
passthrough or PCI etc. is not really important.

Stability, performance and resource utilisation (e.g. possible 
over-allocation of RAM) are matter most.

Thanks for any advice
Peter