bhyve Switching bhyve management tools

ghoti

ghoti

I've been using iohyve to help manage bhyve instances for a couple of years, but I'd like to explore other options.

Is it safe to run multiple management systems on one host (iohyve in addition to, say, cbsd or vm-bhyve), or is there a strategy for migrating guests from one to another? Is there a comparison of the tools that I've been unable to find, to help me choose one? I'd love something that doesn't over-think things; I'd favour some readable shell scripts over a kubernetes clone.

Is it reasonable that I am nervous about continuing to use iohyve? Nothing described in its unaddressed lists of issues or pull requests have bitten me, but with zero attention, I'm not confident it will adapt to future changes in FreeBSD.
 
What about migrating to vm-bhyve if you are too nervous?
 
failure said:
What about migrating to vm-bhyve if you are too nervous?
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Yes, well, that's what I'm asking. Will there be any conflict running iohyve and vm-bhyve on the same box? Is there a migration strategy, or has nobody ever documented this process before?

Are you suggesting vm-bhyve for any particular reason? Are you aware of problems with running iohyve and cbsd on the same server?
 
iohyve and vm-bhyve should run fine together. I can't remember how iohyve lays out the datasets but I would tell vm-bhyve to use a new, separate dataset for storing guests rather than trying to point it at the same place as iohyve.

Conversion would really be a manual process. Definitely possible, especially for guests using either bhyveload or UEFI. Might get a bit tricky for the ones where grub2-bhyve is involved. At the end of the day it's just a zvol containing a guest disk, and both tools are simply calling very similar bhyve commands to run the OS inside that disk image. I don't know if iohyve can log the bhyve command like vm-bhyve does, but seeing the actual commands both use would be a good reference when trying to move a guest from one to the other.

I don't know much at all about CBSD. Again conversion would be theoretically possible but no automated conversion tools exists as far as I'm aware.
 
ghoti said:
Yes, well, that's what I'm asking. Will there be any conflict running iohyve and vm-bhyve on the same box? Is there a migration strategy, or has nobody ever documented this process before?

Are you suggesting vm-bhyve for any particular reason? Are you aware of problems with running iohyve and cbsd on the same server?
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I am using sysutils/vm-bhyve already few years and am satisfied. You can give it a try - it is a collection on shell scrips. Also found a little bug in it and fixed it manually and sent an e-mail to the port maintainer. So far there is no response. The bug is not critical and concerns vm image naming, affecting the provisioning.
 
Switch2BSD said:
Please tell us which bugs? I am using vm-bhyve.
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I have sent the following message to the port maintainer:
There is a small bug in it:


  • When creating compressed images, the image file is named '.z'
  • xz does not recognize this extension, so images created with 'vm image create' will not work
  • Locally I have made the change in file 'vm-zfs' line '_filename="${_uuid}.zfs.xz"' and got it working

I think it is a good idea to fix the FreeBSD port.
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The image files of the VM-s are created with wrong filename extensions. This prevents later provisioning of images. This is just one line in the shell script. Easy to fix by yourself.
 
There's also a gui environment called "virtual machine manager" or "virt-manager" that will work with bhyve.

I have nothing to say about it as I have yet to use it, I'm still using vm-bhyve, however it is another option.

Another project called runhyve looks interesting, a set of wrapper scripts for vm-bhyve exposed as http endpoints {GUI vm manager as a web interface}, although I don't see a port for it.
 
Over here, vm-bhyve suddenly broke all Debian-variant instances - Devuan and Ubuntu. All services running on those boxes are now terminated. FreePBX, which is based on Centos, broke a few times but its image got replaced. I have switched the Debian-variant images with their configure files several times in the past but no luck. There was a time I needed tp make changes to the grub option - something like'vg_root' and later increase the image size. That was the only chance I had to repair a broken instance and image. All had crashed at different times, when the host OS ran out of space.

Hands are now crossed hoping that someday one or more of the instances will kick-in again, perhaps after an upgrade or from an online fix, like before, from someone whose images and vm-bhyve throw similar error.
 
As usdmatt and Argentum said, vm-bhyve is good. I have tried CBSD (for heavy users of virtualisation), io-bhyve, Bastille or so. And perhaps, one or two more that I can't recall their names at present.
 
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