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I was pretty excited about virtualization too but now all I want in FreeBSD is very strong jails features like Solaris has with zones. When I like at the fact that Linux has several full virtualization solutions, that Sun is developing their own technology, that Microsoft is developing their own technology, that Xen is now owned by Citrix, that VMWare is still going their own proprietary route, and that this is just scratching the surface, I really scratch my head and wonder how am I going to support all these technologies and how exactly are all these native virtualization technologies going to work with each other. I'm getting too old to bother. Right now, I will stick with VMWare and when the dust settles, I think that will be a good time for FreeBSD to worry about what technology to exactly support and what technology I should learn.

What are the advantages of zones compared to jails?

Edited 2008-02-19 21:23 UTC

Zones allow more options of resource management, for example you can say that this Zone will yse this and this CPU, ou, and maybe I will also that one later, and that amount of RAM, while Jails does not offer such management/flexibility.

Following the mailinglists shows that jails are receiving focus and better options for tuning resources in jails will be coming (in FreeBSD 8 at latest is my guess).

Full scale virtualisation (a la Zen and VMware) is in my opinion only needed in corner-cases and for running old poorly supported/portable legacy apps. Binary API emulation (in a container like zones/jails/vserver) is the correct way IMHO.

But I will not start Windows nor Solaris in Jail :/



If you talk about xVM, then it is Xen, it has only other name, Sun also bought Innotek lately, and VirtialBox packages are avialable for OpenSolaris.

What FreeBSD has to offer here?
A deadly slow QEMU, even with kqemu, sure there were some works to port Linux KVM, but it is nonusable right now, and it wont be in nearest feture.

Jails are good if you want to start a Jailed FreeBSD, but what for other oses?



I have read about it a little, it is a parody of virtualiation comparing to Xen or VirtualBox.



Xen is on GPL license, so it does not matter who will own the name, it will still be free.



Why use all of them at the same time?

You only need one, two at most at the same time, for example Jail/Zones for OS-level virtualization and VirtualBox/Xen for full virtualization.

FreeBSD is a great, simple and powerfull OS, but if it goes to virtualization, its years behind others, and the sad part is that they (mostly) do nothing to change that.

Virtualization _is_ hype, it's to some degree useful to play with it, but on servers? Jesus, there are other ways of burning your precious resources.

while i like freebsd (run it as my main server now), i really don't like the ports tree. it seems like an dirty hacked together build system. on the list is ports 2.0, but it contains no further information. anybody got some more info? a package system like that one from debian would be sweet..

Wha..? Ports are best thing human kind invented after sliced bread! Package system- you mean like install firefox: "pkg_add -r firefox" or upgrade all ports with precompiled binaries: "portupgrade -PP -a".

RTFM dude.

rtfm? i did so 3 years ago, again today and i'm still having a lot of issues. ports work, but it's almost the worst system there is (only gentoo's source only solution is worse).

* no stable ports tree
* not able to pin packages to specific versions
* no proper post/pre install configuration of packages (exists, but i have never seen i do a lot of usefull stuff like most .deb packages)
* using multiple sources for packages is not possible
* pkg does not have a configuration file, so no overview of the settings and lots of other trouble.
* pkg_info works only for installed packages

are you starting to get the point? pkg is not good, it works sortof, but it's not good. read a bit about apt (or even better, use it) and compare it to pkg. i really hate it when the fanboys start claming pkg is good but never compare it to something else.

rtfm? read it again.

>* not able to pin packages to specific versions

Something similar in make.conf, e.g. for OpenOffice

IGNORE_BUILD= \
editors/openoffice.org-* \

>* no proper post/pre install configuration of packages (exists, but i have never seen i do a lot of usefull stuff like most .deb packages)

You have to look in the proper places. E.g.:

/usr/share/examples

It's KISS, not dictatorship of some maintainer who doesn't care about real world use, but his own small world.

>* pkg does not have a configuration file, so no overview of the settings and lots of other trouble.

>i really hate it when the fanboys start claming pkg is good but never compare it to something else.

If you want some big brother who takes your hand, then you have to use Debian. apt-get is sometimes, like RPM, mere crap in practice.

>* no stable ports tree

And because Debian tells you it's stable, then it is stable of course. Well you mentioned fanboys ... Of course it can be sometimes a menace for servers, but it the end it's pure hell to recompile packages in Debian again and again because of a premature maintainer.

Just some addition for pkg

-> /usr/local/etc/pkgtools.conf

So there you can mess around with pkg configuration

Most people are using FreeBSD, among other things, because of the ports. I don't see any advantage in using something like apt-get/aptitude, which has got enough problems of its own. I don't like pre-compilded packages like in Debian, often borked and to some degree with chosen nonsense-options.