I’ve been meaning to look again at moving my VirtualBox (vbox) Virtual Machines (VMs) into the built-in hypervisor (bhyve using iohyve, the bhyve manager) that’s now in FreeNAS, but at my last attempt, last year didn’t get very far.  I had a little time this afternoon, so thought I’d give it another go!

There’s a little more to read through on the internet than when I first attempted this, and I even found an excellent blog article that talked through migrating a vbox VM here.  This was really easy to follow, and everything seemed to work apart from starting the VM which merely booted to a grub> prompt.  Whatever settings I tried, I couldn’t get it to work, so thought I’d try starting from scratch and create an Ubuntu VM and then configure Onlyoffice again, which I’d done previously and blogged about here.

While this took a little longer than importing the vbox disk, I did get everything up and running and now have my Onlyoffice service running from a bhyve VM on FreeNAS and have switched off the vbox VM.  I’m not going into the detail here, as the blogs above pretty much cover everything anyway.  I did also watch an excellent video on Youtube which shows precisely how to create a bhyve VM on FreeNAS using iohyve, and I’d recommend anyone thinking about this to spend 15 minutes watching this.

Next will be to try and get my CentOS VM which I use to run CrashPlan migrated across.  Although I have a few others which I use from time to time, this and the one I’ve moved above are the two that run 24×7.  With those running in bhyve I could think about updating FreeNAS from 9.10 up to something slightly more up to date.  The latest version is 11.1 and has some of the iohyve VM functionality built into the WUI, although I think you still need the CLI for some things.  11.2 is coming later this year which also changes the way jails work in FreeNAS, so this is probably when I look to move things across.  It would be nice if I’d sorted the VM situation before then…