Re: Hypervisor advice

[Stephen Borrill <netbsd%precedence.co.uk@localhost>]

On Sat, 29 Jul 2017, Andy Ruhl wrote:
> I've had a NetBSD/i386 machine that's been running since the late 90s
> and various hardware iterations. I think it's time to move it to a
> virtual machine. I need new hardware as well. It has about a 10 year
> old AMD processor and 1 gig of memory. This is plenty, but the
> hardware is getting unreliable.
>
> I need advice on hypervisors and if it requires certain hardware,
> hardware advice as well.
>
> bhyve appeals to me for obvious reasons but I've never used it. I use
> KVM and VMWare at work. Also VMWare Fusion on my Mac. Would prefer not
> to pay too much if I need to pay for something. Never tried Xen but I
> see posts about it here once in a while.
>
> I plan on running other stuff on the hypervisor, probably OpenBSD.
> Possibly something else as well, maybe a NAS or something.

XenServer is free and all the major OSes run on it. Only downside is that 
if you want to run its graphical management tool you'll need to run that 
on Windows.

https://xenserver.org/

The free version of XenOrchestra could bypass this requirement though:
https://xen-orchestra.com/

It's probably going to give you the best in terms of hardware support and 
it's easy to install and configure. For storage, you can use local storage 
(either ext2 or LVM), NFS or iSCSI (works great with a NetBSD target 
running net/istgt). There's also SMB storage, but that's part of the 
premium version.

--
Stephen