Virtualization of FreeBSD

[Garrett Cooper]

r17fbsd at xxiii.com wrote:
> At 07:45 PM 6/6/2007, Sean Murphy wrote:
>> Is anyone running virtualization of FreeBSD servers on VMware or 
>> other virtualization software?  What experiences have you had, good 
>> or bad?
>
> Been wanting to ask the same...  I've heard of virt' software for some 
> time but didn't realize what it could really do.  Then on a tip, I 
> started playing with micros$$ts Virtual PC a couple weeks ago.  Wow!  
> It runs windoze 2000 and FreeBSD apparently fine on a windoze 2000 
> host.  In the last couple weeks I've been doing a lot of 
> experimentation with FreeBSD and Samba and windoze that I've been 
> procrastinating about for lack of a spare box to run things on.  Very 
> impressive for free stuff from the evil empire :)
>
> But from what I've heard, VMware has better performance.  And there 
> are some things in ports (qemu?) also.  For my purposes Billy's 
> product is working well, but I'd like to hear of better things, esp 
> those that run on windoze, which I'm stuck with for my desktop boxen.
>
>   -RW
The pecking order works like so IMHO under Windows:
1. VMWare.
2. M$ VPC.
3. Qemu.

-Vmware has the best performance overall from what I've seen, and has 
64-bit support on 64-bit processors, so it wins hands down.
-M$ VPC has better performance than Qemu from what I've seen, but only 
has 32-bit support, so that's out.
-Getting Qemu started on Windows (at least for me), was a pain in the 
a$$. I eventually gave up because it was so slow and the hardware 
virtualization wasn't that great.

I run CURRENT and 6.2-RELEASE on my desktop under Windows because 
hardware support for all my devices isn't quite there yet, and for 
development. It's ok, except when I do CPU intensive tasks, where the 
virtual CPU clock per VM skews a lot/slows down, and this screws up 
shutting down the VMs (they get stuck before FS syncing's started). 
Solution is to run ntpdate before shutdown, to update the VM time.

I'm running VMware server on XP x64 with 4GB of RAM and a Core 2 Duo 
6700 CPU.

-Garrett