What does HackerNews think of vm-bhyve?

FreeBSD Bhyve Virtualization | Aug 2023

I've recently switched from Proxmox to bhyve while upgrading my dedicated box lease. I use it for prod mail&web and various lab work. Should have done it earlier, as I don't really need the things bhyve lacks (suspend, HA/clustering) for my use-cases.

    # vm list
    NAME         DATASTORE  LOADER     CPU  MEMORY  VNC  AUTO     STATE
    access       default    bhyveload  2    8G      -    No       Stopped
    cicd         default    bhyveload  2    6G      -    No       Running (33065)
    feeds        default    grub       2    4G      -    No       Running (35227)
    gate         default    bhyveload  2    4G      -    Yes [1]  Running (21012)
    k8s-master0  default    grub       2    4G      -    Yes [4]  Running (1543)
    k8s-node0    default    grub       6    64G     -    Yes [5]  Running (9988)
    mail         default    bhyveload  3    8G      -    Yes [3]  Running (87082)
    ml           default    grub       4    24G     -    No       Running (64236)
    registry     default    bhyveload  2    2G      -    No       Running (47712)
    repos        default    bhyveload  2    2G      -    No       Running (14767)
    web          default    bhyveload  2    4G      -    Yes [2]  Running (92365)

Other than that, I use bhyve on my laptop daily since around 2015-2016. It was somewhat painful at first. I had to bake a CD key into Windows ISO for headless install but now VNC support exists and it's easy to output any graphical installer via VNC.

bhyve doesn't offer API and has not the most user-friendly interface (vm-bhyve[1] for the rescue!) but overall, I couldn't be happier with its - typical for FreeBSD - set-and-forget stability.

[1] https://github.com/churchers/vm-bhyve

Myths about FreeBSD | Jan 2022

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This is hardly a production use case, but I've had a bare metal server at OVH for several years. It's currently running FreeBSD 13 with bhyve. I have about 4x VMs running on it, including OpenBSD and several different Linux flavors.

Things have just worked and I've really not had any issues with it in the years it's run. The VMs are stored on a mirrored zfs zpool with sparse volumes so they only take up space they actually need.

All that said, I find the bhyve config language and command line options to be pretty painful, so I've been only using it with this frontend: https://github.com/churchers/vm-bhyve

FreeBSD Jails for Fun and Profit | Dec 2021

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Perhaps it would! But the userbase is definitely what finally got me into FreeBSD. The fact that hobbyists were contributing such excellent cli tools as `iocage` [0] and `vm-bhyve` [1] really is what got me over my fears.

[0] https://iocage.io/

[1] https://github.com/churchers/vm-bhyve

Homelab: Intel NUC with the ESXi Hypervisor | Apr 2020

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If you decide to give bhyve a whirl at some point, I highly recommend giving vm-bhyve[1] a try for managing the VMs. Makes lots of tasks much easier.

[1]: https://github.com/churchers/vm-bhyve

BSDploy – FreeBSD jail provisioning | Feb 2017

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Also vm-bhyve, which I've been happily using since 2015. Also amazing, also dead simple.

https://github.com/churchers/vm-bhyve

It is nice that there are multiple wrappers around bhyve - competition is good, and it shows a healthy community.