Re: Hypervisor advice

[David Brownlee <abs%absd.org@localhost>]

On 29 July 2017 at 18:50, Andy Ruhl <acruhl%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
> I've had a NetBSD/i386 machine that's been running since the late 90s
> and various hardware iterations. I think it's time to move it to a
> virtual machine. I need new hardware as well. It has about a 10 year
> old AMD processor and 1 gig of memory. This is plenty, but the
> hardware is getting unreliable.
>
> I need advice on hypervisors and if it requires certain hardware,
> hardware advice as well.
>
> bhyve appeals to me for obvious reasons but I've never used it. I use
> KVM and VMWare at work. Also VMWare Fusion on my Mac. Would prefer not
> to pay too much if I need to pay for something. Never tried Xen but I
> see posts about it here once in a while.
>
> I plan on running other stuff on the hypervisor, probably OpenBSD.
> Possibly something else as well, maybe a NAS or something.

I've been running NetBSD/xen on amd64 for (I think) about six years.
Originally we needed to run few Ubuntu VMs for testing so setup a free
VMWare install on (what was then) a shiny new i7 box, but disk
performance was disappointing, and as there was an old i5 with a
couple of crappy 40GB disks running NetBSD we put xen on it for a
couple of VMs on it. We found it much faster (and I preferred dealing
with VMs via CLI rather than GUI). We switched the i7 to xen and were
able to move from six to ten VMs while still faster than the VMWare.

I'm sure a bigger ($$) VMWare product would have been faster, but we
were not looking to spend any more than we had to, and I *really*
didn't get on with the GUI.

The xen box is still running fine :) There was an issue with Linux 4.4
kernels as guests, but 3.x and 4.8 or later seem fine, and I've run
Windows and NetBSD under it also.

If you want to keep NetBSD as the host then Xen is the obvious option
- you can just install amd64 as normal, add the xen packages and then
adjust boot.cfg to boot then xen kernel and away you go.

On the other hand if you want a FreeBSD host I've heard good things
about bhyve :)

David