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Date:      Sat, 23 Jan 2021 15:14:53 -0800
From:      John Kennedy <warlock@phouka.net>
To:        freebsd-virtualization@freebsd.org
Subject:   RHEL virtualization
Message-ID:  <YAyt7cRRvm9Q4RK0@phouka1.phouka.net>

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At work, we have RHEL (-ish; some RHEL, some CentOS, some OEL).  Mostly v7,
some v8.  Since I'm doing the Covid work-from-home telecommute, I'm trying to
recreate some of my work infrastructure while trying to plan a bit towards
the future (migrating a lot of VMs to Azure).

What I'd like to recreate is my existing kickstart infrastructure, where I
PXE boot the system, feed it anaconda goodness which dovetails into puppet
and I can generate a clean system from a template.  Works great for VMWare
and HyperV, not so much for Azure but if I can generate a snapshot disk
image Azure can ingest, I'll be happy on that score.

I've been very happy with bhyve for FreeBSD.  I messed with VirtualBox for
a while (a long time ago), but with my tendency to track stable (think:
kernel modules) and keep very current on ports-from-source (frequent
package updates, upon which VirtualBox has MANY dependencies) made that a
poorer experience than I had with it on Windows.  I've been very happy with
bhyve since it's basically baked right in.


That being said, RHEL on bhyve has been a pain to figure out.  The best I've
done so far is using sysutils/grub2-bhyve to set up the boot CD, using
BHYVE_UEFI.fd as UEFI firmware (sysutils/bhyve-firmware I think) and then
getting at the console via net/tigervnc-viewer.

Currently I'm fighting grub-bhyve's issue finding the kernel to load (if I'm
finding the right problem reports, it doesn't seem to like modern XFS or
ext4 partitions).  I couldn't get net/ipxe to PXE boot anything, and I din't
manage to get very far with sysutils/uefi-edk2-bhyve.  And of course some
of these are flagged with python2.7 isses.

I'm not a fan of grub-bhyve, but that's mostly because you have to specify
the full kernel-with-version path (changes every kernel update), but I
figure I could make an expect-script that would figure it out if I could
find a /boot filesystem type that grub-bhyve could "ls" properly.


Ignoring my own setup details right now, what would someone currently
bhyving RHEL recommend that I be doing right now?

There is so much old information/documentation out there that I'm really
second-guessing myself and probably chasing a bunch of dying ports.  But
someone on here must be happy with what they've got going for them.




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