available hypervisors in FreeBSD

[Udo Rader]

On 12/20/2015 09:15 AM, Peter Ross wrote:
> 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.

two thoughts:

first, PCI passthru is a nice thing if you want to directly address
NICs, which again is a nice feature for virtualized servers relying in
almost native network throughput.

and second, but you are probably aware of that already, IIRC Xen dom0
support is quite new & lacks some features
(http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/FreeBSD_Dom0)