It’s the start of the work week, so for the IT administrators among us, I have another great article by friend of the website, Stefano Marinelli. This article covers migrating a Proxmox-based setup to FreeBSD with bhyve.
The load is not particularly high, and the machines have good performance. Suddenly, however, I received a notification: one of the NVMe drives died abruptly, and the server rebooted. ZFS did its job, and everything remained sufficiently secure, but since it’s a leased server and already several years old, I spoke with the client and proposed getting more recent hardware and redoing the setup based on a FreeBSD host.
↫ Stefano Marinelli
If you’re interested in moving one of your own setups, or one of your clients’ setups, from Linux to FreeBSD, this is a great place to start and get some ideas, tips, and tricks. Like I said, it’s Monday, and you need to get to work.
Interesting but he made a migration of a perfectly functional system for no apparent reason. It doesn’t have better perfomance so, what’s it? Reliability? Easier to use? He doesn’t say. It seems that he did it because he thinks FreeBSD is cool and he spent the client’s money on it. Unless I’m missing something this is very unprofessional.
My guess is, most of his customers are on FreeBSD so better/easier to manage for his customers by him.
Can you not read? “I spoke with the client and proposed getting more recent hardware and redoing the setup based on a FreeBSD host.” He chose the tooling he’s most familiar with, if he goes AWOL that client will be up the creek without a paddle but that’s out of scope for what was done.
That doesn’t explain anything. Just that the client trusts him. If my provider of whatever recommends me to change to another brand he deals with I can choose to trust him without knowing if it’s truly better.
I’m wondering why he directly starts the kernel from the hypervisor, rather than emulating a traditional UEFI/BIOS machine and letting the bootloader inside the VM start its kernel normally?
Booting the kernel from the hypervisor means the guest OS is no longer in control of what kernel its running, and you have to update the hypervisor settings manually instead of letting the guest take care of its own kernel updates. This is just an unnecessary headache.
The ability to boot a kernel directly instead of invoking a bootloader is mostly intended for kernel developers to quickly test kernels.