FreeNAS 11 Virtualization vs vSphere Hypervisor vs Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V

[SpiritFly]

I know it's way too early for a thread like this, as FreeNAS 11 is still in its early stages of utilizing its virtualization abilities, but I'm sure you can already see its potential and can make a comparison based on that.

So I'm currently in the process of choosing a virtualization platform for my new server. I would be using mostly windows VMs and a few Linuxes. May spin up a pfSense as well.

How do you think FreeNAS 11's virtualization compares to the already popular solutions and how much do you expect it to improve as 11.1,11.2 come up? In what aspects can it improve and what would be the advantages of using FreeNAS to virtualize?

And most importantly, how do you think it will compare in terms of performance?
For example how would the performance of vSphere virtual machines on a server with hardware RAID controller and 2 SATA in RAID0 compare to the same server running VMs under FreeNAS 11 with the same two SATA drives in ZFS Stripe (without using the hardware raid of course)?

I'd really like to do some tests myself now that I have a spare server to play with, but I'd like to hear the community's opinion as well.

 

[scrappy]

Bhyve, the hypervisor used in FreeNAS and based on FreeBSD has been pretty stable for me. It lacks many features you'll find with KVM and Hyper-V, but it also lacks legacy cruft that could cause future security vulnerabilities. You can Google Bhyve performance and read the various sources and sites that test and compare Bhyve to other hypervisors. In my understanding, vSphere is likely the best hypervisor for performance. I used ESXi free version for a while. Performance was good, but the non-paid version of ESXi lacked so many features that it was hardly useful. The Paid version also cost too much for the average home user. From there I ran Proxmox, a Debian based virtualization solution for about a year. It was great virtualization platform and served me well. In the end, FreeNAS + Bhyve VMs made the most sense for my wants and needs.

 

[toadman]

Yes, I suspect that for a single server you'd find bhyve to be the most efficient (perform best), assuming FreeNAS is what is supplying your storage. The other hypervisors have to do the VT-d work and run the network stack for shared storage. I've not used it, so I don't know what issues you may run into on that path.

If you planned to scale it to clusters or multiple clusters I suspect the enterprise grade hypervisors would dominate in terms of management, features, and robustness.

Here is a person that did some performance tests a while back. https://b3n.org/vmware-vs-bhyve-performance-comparison/