First try last night at Installing FreeBSD 6.1 (32bit) in a VM on ESX 3 (full I3 install) on a Dell PE 850 with CERC 6ch SATA board, dual 250gig SATA HD, pentD 820.
FreeBSD install CD booted, however it would not detect the VM SCSI drive. It did dectect the controller, but not the drive. Adding an IDE Vitural disk was not an option that was allowed. FreeBSD 6.x works just fine in VMware Server 1.0 (free download) on both Windows and Linux with no tinkering.
Thanks for the replies. Anyone know how I can get the specifics on these changes? I'm working on migrating from ESX 2 to 3 but we have a number of 4.10-RELEASE-p16 guests. I guess this means I need to upgrade these guests as part of the migration unless I can get the new mpt driver for 4.10-RELEASE-p16.
I've been running stress 0.18.8 with the following options:
--io 7 --hdd 7
inside this FreeBSD 4.10-RELEASE-p16 guest with Buslogic SCSI adapter for about 23 hours now. VM is averaging 82% CPU usage, 60536KBps of disk usage and 91% memory usage over the last 24 hours according to VC 2.0.1. Everything seems to be fine. I'm probably going to run it for another day or so before considering it stable for migration. Can you think of any other tests I should run before migrating this production VM? Any issues that you've heard about with FreeBSD guests and network IO (lnc driver)?
I did notice that this FreeBSD guest on ESX 3 hasn't logged the classic "/kernel: lnc0: Missed packet -- no receive buffer" message like it does on ESX 2 but I only did some very basic network IO tests. I'll look into that further and maybe try out the em driver, I've had problems with using vmxnet before which is why I'm currently using lnc.
I've finished my testing. In the end I let the disk IO stress tool run for about 35 hours and had no issues. After that I went on to do some network IO tests. I started with the lnc driver and downloaded a 500MB file over the Gbit network and averaged about 30MB/sec over 4 or 5 tries, I did notice the standard "no receive buffer" error being logged after these test runs. After that I switched to the em driver and did the same tests this time I averaged 54MB/sec and received no errors.
So, the testing seems to have gone much better than I had expected, it seems that these VMs actually perform better on ESX 3. I decided to migrate one of our production guests over, it's been running since last night and hasn't had any issues so far.
I haven't tried the vmware server version of tools because the version that came with ESX 3.0.1 worked so well. The version that comes with the latest vmware Server is newer than the ESX 3.0.1 version? Is it possible to get a list of what changes/improvements were made in the newer tools version? I may be able to dedicate a couple of test VMs to testing the new version if it sounds like it's worth it to test the improvements. However the current version does seem to work well.
This needs to change. There are enough of us out here that need this. We have >100 FreeBSD VMs in our production environment. The migration to 3.0 makes us officially unsupported now. What are the current prospects of getting FreeBSD 6 support in the next point release?
Andrew's right ... official FreeBSD support would really help to offset some of the scaling problems we've had deploying our new production VI3 environment (ESX3 scales just fine; VirtualCenter is another story altogether.)
