FreeNAS as Xen Dom0

sretalla

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If I understand it correctly, you're proposing to replace bhyve with Xen?

I think bhyve was chosen due to the tight linkage to the FreeBSD kernel and resulting light impact on the host (leaving FreeNAS enough room to be a good Block storage/file/jails server as well).

When VirtualBox was the hypervisor (somehow a bit obvious as it's also an Oracle product... like ZFS and Solaris), resource issues were a notable struggle.
 

Chris123

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A FreeNAS as Xen Dom0-solution would of course be very interesting, but I hear what you are saying on why Bhyve was chosen.

I've had the chance to test Bhyve (FreeNAS) and Xen (XCP-ng) for a few weeks, and for server virtualization these two products differ in maturity. Proxmox (qemu/kvm) seems to land somewhere in between those two.
 

sretalla

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bhyve isn't a type 1 hypervisor, so you shouldn't expect it to compete on an even playing field with ESXi or Xen.

As you note, it is also a new kid on the block and is still developing. I understand it will deliver some incremental improvements in FreeBSD 12 (and hence FreeNAS 12).
 

Artion

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Hi,
me too was wondering on using Xen as an hypervisor on TrueNAS. There are solutions that use both, bhyve and Xen, simultaneously: https://clonos.tekroutine.com/

And maybe the Xen part could be managed by XAPI with tools like XenOrchestra.

Interesting also this project: k8s with freebsd/bhyve
 
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Alex18

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The only thing I am missing in bhyve and what XEN has is support for live migration and seabios (for legacy boot method).

As far as I understand, if XEN is possible with TrueNAS, it will be two different distributions: TrueNAS-bhyve and TrueNAS-XEN edition.

PS: K8S is really popular today. It looks like K8S-bhyve project could be integrated with TrueNAS, since the same technologies and API are used.
 
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