Category: bhyve

Virtualization in 2024: Market Trends, Open-Source Opportunities, Broadcom’s VMware Shake-Up, and Top Solutions to Watch

(2024-12-10):
The year 2024 marked a turning point for the virtualization industry. Following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, significant changes to VMware’s licensing model and pricing structure set off a wave of responses across the market. These changes had a profound impact on the virtualization landscape, altering long-held assumptions and forcing enterprises to re-evaluate their strategies. VMware had long been a leader in the virtualization space, with its solutions forming the backbone of countless enterprise data centers. Its platforms, including vSphere, vSAN, and NSX, were considered industry standards, praised for their robustness and feature set. However, post-acquisition, VMware’s licensing and pricing underwent substantial revisions. For many organizations, these changes represented a significant cost increase, leading to concerns about the sustainability of continuing with VMware’s solutions. The updates, while intended to align with Broadcom’s broader enterprise strategy, prompted businesses to reexamine their dependence on proprietary virtualization platforms. This shift created ripple effects, opening .... [read more]

HowTo: Managing VM on FreeBSD with bhyve and vm-bhyve

(2024-10-26):
The bhyve hypervisor on FreeBSD is an impressive tool that brings lightweight, efficient virtualization capabilities directly into the FreeBSD ecosystem. It’s a powerful type 2 hypervisor that allows FreeBSD users to run virtual machines with minimal overhead, making it an excellent choice for those who value performance and stability. I find bhyve especially compelling for running various Unix-like operating systems like FreeBSD itself, Linux, and even Windows, thanks to UEFI support. In the past, I already wrote many blog posts about virtualization and hypervisor solutions where I also often mentioned bhyve but also the lacks around bhyve. However, bhyve is still an amazing way to virtualize your workloads by running VMs of any operating system. Recently I got ask how I usually manage bhyve and if I could provide a small howto. To manage bhyve VMs more easily, I rely on vm-bhyve, which streamlines the creation, configuration, and operation of .... [read more]

bhyve on FreeBSD and VM Live Migration – Quo vadis?

(2024-10-21):
When I think about bhyve Live Migration, it’s something I encounter almost daily in my consulting calls. VMware’s struggles with Broadcom’s licensing issues have been a frequent topic, even as we approach the end of 2024. It’s surprising that many customers still feel uncertain about how to navigate this mess. While VMware has been a mainstay in enterprise environments for years, these ongoing issues make customers nervous. And they should be – it’s hard to rely on something when even the licensing situation feels volatile. Now, as much as I’m a die-hard FreeBSD fan, I have to admit that FreeBSD still falls short when it comes to virtualization – at least from an enterprise perspective. In these environments, it’s not just about running a VM; it’s about having the flexibility and capabilities to manage workloads without interruption. Years ago, open-source solutions like KVM (e.g., Proxmox) and Xen (e.g., XCP-ng) introduced .... [read more]

Run Linux Containers on FreeBSD 14 with Podman

(2024-10-06):
In one of my recent blog posts, I shared my journey as a long-time FreeBSD user. I talked about how I’ve been incredibly happy with the system, appreciating its rock-solid stability, flexibility, and performance. But, like every OS, FreeBSD had its gaps, especially when it came to some modern developments – one of which has been a pain point for many of us working with containerized environments: native support for Docker and Podman Linux images. Until recently, this missing functionality made working with containerized applications a bit of a challenge. Let me explain why that’s changed and how FreeBSD 14 has finally caught up to the container party. The Old Way: bhyve Linux VMs For a long time, one of the workarounds for running Linux containers on FreeBSD was to spin up a Linux VM using bhyve, FreeBSD’s native hypervisor. While bhyve is fantastic in its own right (fast, lightweight, .... [read more]

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