Adding existing bhyve VM to FreeNAS 11 gui

[Zenith_UK]

Hi all,

I created some Debian bhyve guests on FreeNAS 9.10 and have upgraded to FreeNAS 11 RC1, so I can start using the gui VM features and VNC console.

My old bhyve guests are still running fine after the upgrade, but are not listed in the gui VM section.

Anyone have any ideas on how I can add them to the gui, or am I just going to have to bite the bullet and rebuild them?

The add disk

Many thanks in advance

I'm loving the VNC console now on this version - it makes installing new VMs a breeze

 

[KrisBee]

Were your existing Debian VMs created using the grub bootloader? Were they stored on zvols?

 

[Zenith_UK]

Hi KrisBee,

Yes to both questions.

Since posting, I have been digging around a bit and I think my best option is to somehow copy the zvol disk to a new dataset, then run iohyve delete <server> which will remove the old VM (including the old zvol). Then I can create a new VM in the gui and point it at that disk device.

What I'm not sure of exactly, being new to ZFS, is how to copy that zvol disk device. It seems a clone from a snapshot is still linked to the original zvol and I am concerned that when the original zvol is deleted, I will then have issues (correct me if I'm wrong there)

Another option I considered was removing the disk mapping from the vm device device.map file, so when the vm is deleted, perhaps the disk device won't be deleted. I would need to test that theory first though with a new VM.

Any advice appreciated.

 

[KrisBee]

OK, on zvol is good, surely you can just reference that as your VM hard drive. But using the grub bootloader will need converting your Debian VM to use UEFI. Have a look at this thread:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...-boot-linux-vms-using-uefi.54039/#post-375824

 

[Zenith_UK]

Thanks KrisBee. Since the last post I decided to create a new dataset and zvol and then used dd to clone the original one to it. I had just hit the bootloader issue actually. Thanks for the link. Will update when I get it going.

 

[Zenith_UK]

KrisBee - thanks very much for the guidance. After some hairpulling, I have got my debian machines booting using UEFI and now managed by the gui VM manager.

Just to answer your question about referencing the original zvol, I have previously observed that when you run iohyve delete <vm>, it also deletes the associated zvol along with it, so I had to make sure I had a copy of it for the new VM before tidying up the old one.

It seems the v11 gui VM manager does not delete the zvols when you delete a VM, which seems a better approach.

 

[KrisBee]

Swings and roundabouts ... You could be left with orphaned zvols, or see this as a plus when running a lot of test VM installs using the same zvol. Anyway, glad you've got it sorted.