09-19, 11:00–14:00 (Europe/Dublin), Foyer A
This tutorial digs into using FreeBSD's bhyve hypervisor and using virtualization for running FreeBSD or other operating systems on top of a FreeBSD host system.
During this tutorial we
- set up a FreeBSD guest VM
- connecting to your vm via serial console and VNC
- connect this VM to the network: routed or bridged?
- use ZFS for snapshotting and restoring VM states
- check out different vm management tools for simplifying bhyve use
- review necessary steps and caveats for virtualizing Windows or Linux
Prerequisites
This tutorial is tailored for an audience that is reasonably well-versed with using FreeBSD or Unix-like operating systems. You need to feel comfortable navigating a command line console and should be aware of networking basics.
You don't need to be familiar with bhyve or any other hypervisor, though it may help. Depending on the audience, we'll take a quick peek at the basics first if necessary.
This course is best enjoyed as a hands-on experience. Hence, there are a handful of requirements that need to be fulfilled so you can participate and follow along - aside from the aforementioned knowledge level, you will need
- console access to a FreeBSD system, with root level privileges
- it should be a current 14.0 RELEASE FreeBSD system, with up-to-date patches installed because we will rely on a couple of features that were only introduced recently
- preferably, said system should be a bare metal system because performance may be impacted otherwise or in the worst case, bhyve will not work
- you don't necessarily need direct hands-on access to said system, an ssh session will suffice
- your system should have Internet access to be able to download relevant FreeBSD related files; if you have a current FreeBSD ISO preloaded, it may be just enough to make it without connectivity.
You will need to execute commands on your system and understand the consequences of mistakes. You may lock yourself out of your system if you don't watch out, so be prepared and have a backup.
Born and raised in Austria, Chris studied Computer Science at the University of Technology in Vienna, Austria. He's been in IT since the late 90s and started working with FreeBSD around release 5. For the past 14 years he's worked in the construction industry in various IT management roles.
In 2021 he first became more active in the community by becoming a port maintainer and when Greg Wallace at the FreeBSD Foundation founded the Enterprise Working Group in 2023, he joined as volunteer. Since then, he's been an active contributor around bhyve and documentation, working on making FreeBSD even more useful and usable for enterprise use.
You can find Chris on LinkedIn as well as the regular weekly bhyve calls organized by Michael Dexter (see callfortesting.org for more details)