Virtual Machine Performance | 11.2-U3

[schoolpost]

Hello,

As as long time 9.10 user I recently made the jump to 11.2 One of the features I've long anticipated trying is the built in support for VM's

System specs:
-Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5675 @ 3.07GHz (24 cores)
-64GB RAM
-240GB SSD for VM/Jails

Have to say, it's been a mixed bag with how well they've been working.
I deployed an Ubuntu server with PiHole as my first test, this worked rather ok.

But recently I deployed a Windows 10 VM and the experience has been horrible.
-Installation took over 2 hours, installing onto a ssd based zvol
-It's always stuck at 100% cpu utilization, changing my core count hasn't helped. ( from what I can tell it only even see 1 core, whether I assign 4 or 8 )
-interacting with it through VNC is basically impossible, its constantly locks up and freezes.



Is this an active issue for others using 11.2? or an isolated case on my part? Is it being looked into?

 

[Shane_pcs]

Check your network driver. I had to actually go to a previous version of VirtIO network driver to get the windows VM stable. 1.31 or something along that line.

 

[ChrisChros]

At the FreeBSD-Wiki there is written that for Win 10 virtio-win-0.1.118 is required. But also with this version the experience it is still bad.
In my case it could also the CPU, the Intel G4600 is not really a high performance CPU. Maybe in your case it is working.

 

[parylizer]

Did you ever solve this issue? Having the same problem.

 

[ChrisChros]

Not really. I improved it a little bit by using the disk virtio drivers.
Also a change of the CPU and allocate 4 vCPU to the VM did not improve that much.

 

[Shane_pcs]

I solved it by switching to vmware, with a virtualized freenas install. Not what you wanted to hear i'm sure but I could not be happier.

 

[ChaosBlades]

bhyve just simply isn't mature. Most of the fixes for these kinds of issues are really just workarounds. The best thing to do is have VMs on separate hardware running something like VMware on linux and leaving FreeNAS as a BSD only machine. Maybe in a few years this will start to change. If you really need VMs on your NAS then I think your only option would be Unraid.

 

[joeschmuck]

I've been reliably running VMWare ESXi on a machine and FreeNAS on top of that since early 2016 and have had zero problems. Even replacing a failing hard drive, or replacing my entire pool was not much effort. Plus I get better performance and compatibility with other OS's when using ESXi. There are other free Hypervisors of course so you should choose the one you like, assuming you go down that path.

 

[John Doe]

I've been reliably running VMWare ESXi on a machine and FreeNAS on top of that since early 2016 and have had zero problems. Even replacing a failing hard drive, or replacing my entire pool was not much effort. Plus I get better performance and compatibility with other OS's when using ESXi. There are other free Hypervisors of course so you should choose the one you like, assuming you go down that path.

same here, 2 systems with ESXi and virtualized Freenas no issues so far in the past year

 

[devilkin]

Sorry to necrobump this thread, but I'm looking at starting with FreeNAS, and running VM's on the same hardware is a bit of a requirement here (WAF / space / ...)

Are there particular things to watch out for when using FreeNAS under esxi?
What do you run your esxi / VM storage on - shared back from Freenas?

 

[joeschmuck]

The main thing to watch out for is shutting down your VMs that rely on FreeNAS storage before shutting down the FreeNAS VM. If you don't do this correctly, you will know it.