Replace Jails With VM's in FreeNAS 11

[Soloam]

I was wondering, is there any one replacing all the Jails with a single VM?

The Jail system is nice, having one single ip for one process, but the system is outdated, some jails take forever to update, and maintenance is very time consuming in some cases and the update process is very hard in some cases (looking at you emby).

With the new VM system, some jails can go to a Linux VM for example, and put all the cpu's in the VM and memory. For example in my setup, 8 Virtual CPU's and 16 of RAM. Any problem on doing this? The VM will only use the resources if it needs it correct?

Thank You All

 

[wblock]

VMs use far more resources than jails. Things like RAM usage for a VM are fixed, where a jail only uses what it needs. I don't understand the bit about updates and maintenance, how is that any different from a VM?

 

[Soloam]

The main difference, at lest for some jails that I use, is the delay on some packages to have a version to FreeBSD, and then some major updates need the action from a developer of the jail to update the package.

 

[Bigtexun]

So the packages that are directly supported by any operating system are not going to be the most current for that software. The teams that maintain packages have different reasons for not being on the latest version, and it is up to you to use those packages instead of doing your own installation. The package maintainers are often doing the work for free, and a package is more than the latest version of code, in involves mapping dependencies, and testing... all to make it easy on the end user. If you are sophisticated enough to know you are not on the current code, you are probably sophisticated to do your own manual install. But if you do a manual install, you own the process of maintaining the system. So you get to choose, older packages that have been tested by someone else, or latest version that you maintain yourself.

If you want your life to be easy, and have packages up to date, you are free to hire a team of developers to contribute that work on your behalf...

As for jails vs VM's, I used to think jails are outdated, old technology. But I was wrong in that thinking, and in my opinion you are wrong too. In big enterprises with large workloads, technologies like Jails and Containers are becoming the dominant way to handle big workloads. They are far more efficient than VM's, and they deploy faster. You should be thanking the FreeNAS developers for using jails, and keeping FreeNAS, and the applications you run on it, efficient.

 

[chris crude]

Some people use FreeNAS as first and foremost a quality data storage/file server. Some people use it as media server and torrent/plex box.
Yes people have moved to VMs who don't want to wait for package updates. Yes jails take less resources. It really depends on your priorities.

 

[melloa]

@Soloam

People above have good points. My personal experience is that maintainers do their best based on available time and OS limitations to keep the updates.

When we use a FOSS we have to consider that.

I did move all my jails and plugins to VMs, but under another platform: VMWare. That, of course, required another box to be built, more power consumption, etc (I didn't want to virtualize my FreeNAS).

For me the end results were positive, as I could choose what and how to run my applications.

Moving your jails to VMs will bring some pluses and some minuses (Refer to above comments), but at the end of the day it is your personal decision.

As background what prompted me to that move was exactly the plugins not be on the last version and Premium Music Library not be supported by gracenote under FreeBSD (and I think still not supported).

 

[Soloam]

Let's get something straight! I'm not criticizing the plug in developers! I know they do their best, and that is the top that someone can ask for... No need to make a replay telling me to do this or do that if I'm unhappy... I'm more that happy with FreeNAS, and more than thankful to all the dev team!

My post was only on the optics of analysis of pros and cons on Plugins and vms. I've shown my perspective on what was bothering me on jails, and what was bothering me on vms (resources). And i opened this post to see if any one had this same questions!

 

[scrappy]

You can always create a standard, empty jail and manually install the services you want if they can be ran on FreeBSD. It requires more work, but at least you can keep those services mostly up to date as compared to using plugins. IMO, jails will always be the better choice when the service you're looking for is available on FreeBSD. If not, a VM is still better than nothing. I currently run Crashplan and a game server on Linux VMs. For these use cases it just makes more sense to do so.

 

[Soloam]

I also use crashplan on a Linux vm! That was one of my doubts... If you allready have a VM to begin with, will put more services in that vm be more painful for resources that building a new jail and run it side by side with the vm?

 

[scrappy]

I also use crashplan on a Linux vm! That was one of my doubts... If you allready have a VM to begin with, will put more services in that vm be more painful for resources that building a new jail and run it side by side with the vm?

Jails are very slim in terms resources required by the host (FreeNAS). I prefer running services in individual jails whenever possible because it's simply more secure than bundling a bunch of services inside one VM. Also, mounting FreeNAS datasets inside a jail via nullfs is a better solution IMHO than NFS, SMB, AFP etc., since nullfs does not rely on a network connection to share data.