Virtual Machines in FreeBSD

Although our infrastructures runs off FreeBSD and OpenBSD, admittedly, sometimes I need to dabble into Linux for some programs. This is mainly because web developers typically aren't targeting their builds to run on a FreeBSD system.

So, when I need to run Linux on something, I've turned to FreeBSD's bhyve hypervisor. Here is a quick few steps to get setup, using vm-bhyve:

# pkg install vm-bhyve
# sysrc vm_enable="YES"
# zfs create -o mountpoint=/vm zroot/vm
# sysrc vm_dir="zfs:zroot/vm"
# vm init

Those steps should get you initialized to start testing things out. You might want to create a virtual switch as wll, using vm switch create. In my case, I already have a bridge configured that I wanted to use, so I used this:

# vm switch create -t manual -b bridge0 public

I also happed to already have an image file with a copy of Alpine Linux installed on it, so here is how I configured the vm:

# zfs create alpine
# zfs configure alpine

That takes you to the configuration file for the vm, and here is roughly what I set:

loader="uefi"
graphics="yes"
graphics_listen="0.0.0.0"
graphics_port="5900"
graphics_vga=io

cpu=2
memory=2048M

network0_type="virtio-net"
network0_switch="public"

disk0_type="virtio-blk"
disk0_name="/path/to/alpine.img"
disk0_dev="custom"

uuid="69e879d0-9c4f-4e12-83af-da07b29e9528"
network0_mac="58:9c:fc:09:c3:f3"

disk1_type="virtio-9p"
disk1_name="shared=/path/to/shared_dir/"
disk1_dev="custom"

So I disabled the bhyveload loader, and set the UEFI one, with a VNC listener.

You also might notice the 9p share in there. In the /etc/fstab file in Alpine, I have this line, to mount that shared directory into the vm:

shared     /mnt     9p     trans=virtio,version=9p2000.L   0       0

You use the 9p share name (in this case, "share") and the path where you want to mount it.

If you're looking to use virtual machines in FreeBSD, I hope this helps get you started on a good path.

It should be noted, you don't have to use this vm-bhyve package. I have used scripts to manually start/stop/install virtual machines just using the bhyve and bhyvectl utilities.

Be Strong, and of a Good Courage.

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