C bhyve administration tool

[Matt Churchyard]

> Hello!
>
> Couple months ago I started writing a bhyve management tool in C for 
> our startup, in preparation for migration to FreeBSD for our servers. 
> The goal was to be able to create, drop, and auto-start/stop/restart 
> VMs, individually or all at once, and provide a plugin infrastructure 
> to expose some metrics / errors for reporting and aggregation. More 
> importantly it would detect errors/failures, report them and attempt 
> to restart the VM per assigned policy.
>
> The effort stalled due to some high priority work that crept in.
> However, I am planning on restarting soon and wanted to check if there 
> was a need for something like this.  I ran across Michael Dexter's 
> vmrc, and although its shell based, it does provide quite a bit of 
> features that we were looking for.  There's also iohyve. And I heard 
> Peter and Neel are working on something as well. If there is interest, 
> this would be open sourced from the start. Or if there is an existing 
> effort that addresses these problems, I would love to contribute to that project.
>
> Thoughts, comments, concerns, please share.
>

>vm-bhyve is most mature to this point IME, just don't use the ports version.

> Adam

Thanks Adam :)

I could do with updating the port. Unfortunately this is my first porting experience so not exactly sure of the 'correct' channel to go through to get things updated. It took 2 months for my original port request to be addressed and I'm not sure re-opening that bug is the right way to do it.

If anyone uses the port, the error that gets printed when running 'vm init' can be completely ignored. It's just trying to load any existing virtual switches from the switch configuration file, and complaining that the switch configuration file doesn't exist. Apart from that and a few newer features/tweaks, I don't think there's anything particularly show-stopping about the current port/package if people prefer installing it that way to downloading from GitHub.

Of course it would still be interesting to see a "real" bhyve management tool (possibly even an official one) written in C.

Matt