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Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:41:07 -0600
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From: Mark Felder <feld@feld.me>
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Subject: Re: so, FreeBSD on VMware is dead, right?
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FreeBSD on ESX here. Unfortunately our boss wants us to move to Citrix Xen  
even though they don't* support VMotion type features on FreeBSD because  
we've spent upwards of $50,000 USD in support/licensing on VMWare over the  
last year and it's been over a year without a fix to our crash bug  
directly related to bad behavior in their I/O virtualization layer. (ESX  
4.1)

So besides the few VMs that crash ~weekly, it runs great, and we have a  
ton of FreeBSD VMs which will never be changed to another OS.

FreeBSD needs more love from VMWare, but I don't think it's dead..  
However, it's rather disappointing to hear their techs say. "FreeBDS?[sic]  
What is that, some kind of Linux?"


* Citrix NetScaler product is based on a fork of FreeBSD 6.x and Citrix  
offers a VM appliance that runs on Xen and does support their VMotion  
equivalent. Why they won't port or give us the Xen Tools that exist on  
that appliance is a mystery. I've considered taking their trial appliance,  
dissecting it, and trying to make it run on stock FreeBSD with compat6x  
and what other hacks are necessary, but I'm sure they have kernel modules  
that definitely will not work on 8.x or 9.x without being recompiled....