Hi everyone,
I've been running FreeBSD (currently 11.1) / ZFS on baremetal for nearly 10 years at home. I just upgraded the machine to a new Supermicro Xeon Scalable platform. I am now considering running something else on the host and run FreeBSD within a VM, along with other linux vms.
There are vmware platforms (I know nothing about these). I could also try running CentOS on baremetal and run FreeBSD inside of KVM.
What are your experiences with this and what would you recommend? I'm only interested in mature boring technologies, the calibur you'd really use in production in serious company. I have no interest wasting my time with bleeding edge bugs and incompatibilities.
--- TLDR ---
FreeBSD has worked well enough in the past but its getting to the point where I keep running into the limitations of FreeBSD support in software and hardware. Every time I read some performance comparison article FreeBSD is always way behind Linux. In terms of hardware support FreeBSD is and always will be way behind Linux. For hardware, linux is even better than windows nowadays, especially for older hardware.
As much I like FreeBSD, the professional world is Linux and therefore I think investing my time learning FreeBSD specific tools over Linux tools is not optimal. There are a lot of things about Linux that I don't like, but if I were running a tech company I would never take the huge risk of running the core business on a BSD platform.
The immediate use case is that currently I need to setup a linux VM to run a piece of software that only works on Linux. This software requires that I pci-pass my sound card. I tried to set it up using bhyve VM. First I ran into problems with some linux distros failing to boot. Finally when I got a debian image to work, FreeBSD host dmsg started spitting out errors on my disk controller which was seriously alarming. No way I'm going to run bhyve if it has any chance of messing with my data on the host. The fact that it can't even boot some linux images really kills my faith that bhyve is worth taking seriously in production.
I was using iohyve to try to setup and manage vms which is still beta quality software and has some issues of its own. Its pretty bad that bhyve doesn't have a sane command line interface to let you easily start and stop vms with config files. I'm not interested in spending time to write my own scripted wrapper over top of the raw bhyve command.
The 2 killer BSD features for me are ZFS and Jails.
I have no plans to migrate my storage array off of ZFS. I don't at all trust ZFS on linux, so at a minimum for a new setup I would need to continue running FreeBSD in a VM with direct pci-passthrough on my storage controller.
I really like using jails to create isolated environments for running different services. This is more about managing an environment, user accounts, networking/firewall control, and pkg dependencies more than it is about security. Although security is a nice benefit too. Its also great you can do this without the overhead of full hardware virtualization. I guess the linux alternative here is docker?
Anyway, I'd be really curious to know if anyone else is dealing with similar concerns and how your solutions played out for you?
Thanks!
I've been running FreeBSD (currently 11.1) / ZFS on baremetal for nearly 10 years at home. I just upgraded the machine to a new Supermicro Xeon Scalable platform. I am now considering running something else on the host and run FreeBSD within a VM, along with other linux vms.
There are vmware platforms (I know nothing about these). I could also try running CentOS on baremetal and run FreeBSD inside of KVM.
What are your experiences with this and what would you recommend? I'm only interested in mature boring technologies, the calibur you'd really use in production in serious company. I have no interest wasting my time with bleeding edge bugs and incompatibilities.
--- TLDR ---
FreeBSD has worked well enough in the past but its getting to the point where I keep running into the limitations of FreeBSD support in software and hardware. Every time I read some performance comparison article FreeBSD is always way behind Linux. In terms of hardware support FreeBSD is and always will be way behind Linux. For hardware, linux is even better than windows nowadays, especially for older hardware.
As much I like FreeBSD, the professional world is Linux and therefore I think investing my time learning FreeBSD specific tools over Linux tools is not optimal. There are a lot of things about Linux that I don't like, but if I were running a tech company I would never take the huge risk of running the core business on a BSD platform.
The immediate use case is that currently I need to setup a linux VM to run a piece of software that only works on Linux. This software requires that I pci-pass my sound card. I tried to set it up using bhyve VM. First I ran into problems with some linux distros failing to boot. Finally when I got a debian image to work, FreeBSD host dmsg started spitting out errors on my disk controller which was seriously alarming. No way I'm going to run bhyve if it has any chance of messing with my data on the host. The fact that it can't even boot some linux images really kills my faith that bhyve is worth taking seriously in production.
I was using iohyve to try to setup and manage vms which is still beta quality software and has some issues of its own. Its pretty bad that bhyve doesn't have a sane command line interface to let you easily start and stop vms with config files. I'm not interested in spending time to write my own scripted wrapper over top of the raw bhyve command.
The 2 killer BSD features for me are ZFS and Jails.
I have no plans to migrate my storage array off of ZFS. I don't at all trust ZFS on linux, so at a minimum for a new setup I would need to continue running FreeBSD in a VM with direct pci-passthrough on my storage controller.
I really like using jails to create isolated environments for running different services. This is more about managing an environment, user accounts, networking/firewall control, and pkg dependencies more than it is about security. Although security is a nice benefit too. Its also great you can do this without the overhead of full hardware virtualization. I guess the linux alternative here is docker?
Anyway, I'd be really curious to know if anyone else is dealing with similar concerns and how your solutions played out for you?
Thanks!
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