Vcenter on FreeNAS via bhyve

[hotstovejer]

OK, wild hair up my rump, but let's see what comes of it.

Building a ESX lab box and a FreeNAS box. I don't want to install vcenter on the esx host itself, and I don't want to dedicate a physical machine just for vcenter. So you can deploy a vcenter appliance to your esx host, but I don't want to take up the space. Anyone using bhyve to run a vcenter instance?

 

[Chris Moore]

You probably need to look at the build that @Stux did using ESXi to setup a virtual FreeNAS instance and pass the drives through from the host to the VM.
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...node-304-x10sdv-tln4f-esxi-freenas-aio.57116/

 

[hotstovejer]

I don't want to virtualize freenas, I want to virtualize vcenter via bhyve ON Freenas. Does that make sense?

 

[Chris Moore]

I don't want to virtualize freenas, I want to virtualize vcenter via bhyve ON Freenas. Does that make sense?

I was suggesting an alternative approach that might be a solution for you and it never hurts to look, you might find some useful information in the very well documented article that @Stux wrote.

Does that make sense?

Sure it does. I can read and write in English.

 

[Stux]

Vcenter appliance just runs on Linux right? And there are docker images for it too.

It should work fine from bhyve using Linux.

 

[ChriZ]

I believe that with only one host, vcenter is not really necessary.
It does offer some extra stuff, but they are useful in large deployments with many VMs.
So unless you only want to experiment with vcenter, it is not really necessary in your case.