[OpenIndiana-discuss] Welcome bhyve!

[Stephan Althaus]

Good Evening to everybody!

.. just to share my experience ..

With the integration of bhyve in to illumos and the packaging of the 
needed into Openindiana,
we have besides the elderly kvm and the up-to-date virtualbox a third 
modern virtualization method: bhyve.

If you want to try it out and are using VirtualBox:
You can install both bhyve and virtualbox,
but you can use only one of them.
Once a bhyve vm is startet, Virtualbox vms will not start until the next 
reboot,
because the bhyve vmm kernel module does not unload
(in other words: i had no luck trying it :-)


My first ubuntu vm was easily set up in following the instructions here:

https://omnios.org/info/bhyve_kvm_brand

Someone interested in PCI passthru might want to have a look here:

https://www.pbdigital.org/omniosce/bhyve/openbsd/2020/06/08/bhyve-zones-omnios.html


After some fiddling i got a Win7 vbox-vm to work on bhyve:

1) dladm create-vnic -l e1000g4 vnic1
zfs create -V 32G home2/vm/Win7vol1

2) Convert vm disk:

a) VBoxManage  clonemedium disk Win7.vhd win7d1.vmdk --format VMDK
b) /usr/bin/amd64/qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O raw win7d1.vmdk win7d1.raw
c) dd if=win7d1.raw of=/dev/zvol/rdsk/home2/vm/Win7vol1 bs=512

3) i had to switch it from legacy to uefi mode, by re-partitioning, 
repair startup with win7 installation iso ....
if your vm is using UEFI you're lucky
In case of boot problems read here: 
https://www.jongibbins.com/solving-uefi-boot-problems-on-bhyve-freenas-vm/

4) Install network driver via virtio-win-0.1.185.iso
-> 
https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/archive-virtio/virtio-win-0.1.185-2/
-> 
https://www.ateamsystems.com/tech-blog/howto-windows-10-bhyve-w-freebsd-11/


Nothing special in the zone cfg but:

...
add attr
set name="diskif"
set type="string"
set value="ahci"
end
...

..which might be renoved if you install the corresponding Windows 
drivers - i did not try it yet.


*Thanks* to all the active developers for giving us this great OS !!!


Happy trying!

Stephan