Virtualbox or KVM or XEN as host in freenas with kernel support akka type2 hypervisor

[kfnas]

Would be excellent to have the opportunity to have hypervisor directly supported from the freenas either virtualbox or xen or kvm, so some small projects can be run on top of the freenas @ baremetal... On those days the baremetal is strong enough to support this feature.

You can see how microsoft did the approach in this domain, you can install free hyper-v server 2012 r2 and on top of the hypervisor, the server can run CIFS SMB 3.0 or it's "software raid" functionality...

 

[cyberjock]

It sound great in theory, but I think that in practice the idea is borderline stupid. The number of problems this is likely to create will increase rapidly because too many people won't have a clue. I want my file server to be stable. And virtualizing things like this isn't known to be stable. :P

 

[kfnas]

The praxis depends on the running user, stable kernel/drivers and uptodate hypervisor. This feature should not be enabled by default,right. Should be available as an option. In freebsd 10 a bhyve (http://bhyve.org/) is added, thus bhyve is not yet capable of running all popular systems (windows,macos..) and freenas is not yet ported on FreeBSD 10. But as almost any user, who has decided to install FreeNAS instead of running NAS4FREE, ported XPEnology (those systems are NAS out of box) does not own a datacenter with a free energy bill or hardware intensive baremetal. Also TrueNAS is yet oriented on top modern low power 8 core avoton c2750 with ECC support (only two vendors are implementing avoton for a public supermicro and asrock) where asrock does offer 12 sata ahci ports and yes, that is an echo for a FreeNAS user request.
So maybe you have a lot of HW at home, enough money for a energy bill or you just not need any additional features, but some of us don't and looking for a optimalisation in every corner. And yes, that is enviroment friendly.

 

[cyberjock]

bhyve has been discussed by iX in the IRC more than once. No clue if/when we're going to be based on FreeBSD 10, or if bhyve support will ever be included in FreeNAS. But more than 1 person would prefer bhyve support to the current jails setup.

 

[kfnas]

As a step forward, a supported virtualbox plugin would be also welcomed...