Another excellent guide from friend of the website Stefano Marinelli.
A client of mine has several Windows Server VMs, which I had not migrated to FreeBSD/bhyve until a few weeks ago. These VMs were originally installed with the traditional BIOS boot mode, not UEFI, on Proxmox. Fortunately, their virtual disks are on ZFS, which allowed me to test and achieve the final result in just a few steps.
This is because Windows VMs (server or otherwise) often installed on KVM (Proxmox, etc.), especially older ones, are non-UEFI, using the traditional BIOS boot mode. bhyve doesn’t support this setup, but Windows allows changing the boot mode, and I could perform the migration directly on the target FreeBSD server.
↫ Stefano Marinelli
I link to guides like these because finding such detailed guides born out of experience, written by actual humans with actual experience – instead of bots on content farms – is remarkably hard. There’s more than enough similar content like this out there covering Windows or popular Linux distributions like Red Hat, but the BSDs tend to fall a bit short here. As such, promoting people writing such content is something I’ll happily do.
Marinelli also happens to host the Matrix server (as part of his BSD Cafe effort) that houses the OSNews Matrix room, accessible by becoming an OSNews Patreon.
Nothing against FreeBSD …. but why?
Proxmox is stupid easy to maintain…. why make this harder?? If anything you have probably backed yourself into a corner and in the event of failures you will be blamed for transitioning to this system which isn’t designed to mitigate failures.
I mean if “proxmox for freebsd” existed I’ll be cool with this… but this just sounds like unhappy clients waiting to happen. it also sounds like if you get hit by a bus… nobody will be able to fix this for them.
For fun? Or because screw monocultures?
Also if you know how Freebsd is also easy to maintain, if not easier. Surely if he kicks the bucket there are other admins out there capable to help, it’s not brain surgery.
To resurrect a favourite quote from Usenet days:
| This is Unix, we shouldn’t be saying “why would you want to do that”,
| we should be saying “sure, you can do that if you want.” 🙂
| — Steve Hayman {[email protected]}
Cool. But this is job for paying client, not homelab on old Dell desktop or philosophy class. I’m curoius what are benefis over choosing more popular system.
He answers “why”, at least for him, in a linked article:
https://it-notes.dragas.net/2024/06/10/proxmox-vs-freebsd-which-virtualization-host-performs-better/
Short-version: I/O performance.