Bhyve – Virtualization on FreeBSD

Bhyve(BSD Hypervisor) is an Open hypervisor developed on FreeBSD with features like EPT and Virtio. It is built in to FreeBSD from Version 10.0. In this procedure we will look at how to create a Basic VM using Bhyve.

Minimum Hardware required for bhyve are

1. VT enabled Processor -Intel only (AMD is not supported as of 9/6/2014). For more details on Processor support refer to the following links. https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve/AMD
2. 4GB RAM (Recommended)
3. 7200 RPM HDD or higher

Basic configuration

Create bridge and tap interface

ifconfig bridge0 create
ifconfig tap0 create
sysctl net.link.tap.up_on_open=1

Add the tap interface “tap0” and ethernet interface “em0” to the bridge “bridge0”

ifconfig bridge0 addm em0 addm tap0

Bring up the bridge “bridge 0”

ifconfig bridge0 up

Copy the template file to the present folder

cp /usr/share/examples/bhyve/vmrun.sh bhyve1.sh

Issue execute permissions to the file

chmod +x bhyve1.sh

Change the configuration of the VM you are about to bring up. Edit the following lines for the virtual memory, no of cpus to be emulated and tap interface to be used

DEFAULT_MEMSIZE=512M
DEFAULT_CPUS=2
DEFAULT_TAPDEV=tap0

Load the modules needed for Bhyve to work

kldload vmm
kldload if_tap

Download a FreeBSD boot ISO file which has virtio feature, say FreeBSD10 boot only ISO.

fetch ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/amd64/ISO-IMAGES/10.2/FreeBSD-10.2-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso

Create the HDD image file

truncate -s 10g bhyve1.img

Running the VM

Install OS on the VM using the following command by booting it off the ISO file.

./bhyve1.sh -i -I  FreeBSD-10.2-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso fbsd10