Hi Reyk, > On Jul 4, 2017, at 8:21 AM, Reyk Floeter <[email protected]> >> Hi, >> >> Just thought I'd chime in that I've had success with OpenBSD 5.x to >> 6.0 running under VMware Fusion (Mac OS X version of VMware). There >> isn't support for guest additions with the most recent version of >> Fusion (8.x), but I haven't had any issues. >> > > I don't know what you mean with "there isn't support for guest > additions". We don't support VMware's 3rd party tools but we use our > own drivers.
My apologies, that was incorrect phrasing on my part. By "guest additions" I meant the 3rd party tools that you mentioned above (ie: adding clipboard support between host and guest VM's, etc.). And you're also right about OpenBSD's driver support - I note that in dmesg for my VM's that the kernel is aware of the hypervisor. > VMware Fusion Pro 8.5.8 with version 12 VMs works fine, vmt(4) > attaches, provides guest services such as shutdown/reboot, timedelta > sensor, and access to VMware's guestinfo key/value via hostctl(8) (eg. > hostctl guestinfo.ip). X11-related features are provide by vmwh in > ports, but I've never tested it. We also have vmx(4) for vmxnet3 > networking but you manually have to edit the .vmx file and change > ethernetX.virtualDev = "vmxnet3" (VMware has ignored all of our > requests to add a device profile for OpenBSD). Ah, that's very interesting - I was completely unaware of X11 related features. I had just a plain vanilla install and hadn't installed any ports, but I will definitely take some time to experiment with this. I know this is probably speculation, but was there any sort of dialog from VMware as to why they would not add the device profile ? I am fine with manually editing the .vmx, but I don't understand why this would not be accommodated by VMware. > The only issue that I just saw with -current is that ahci(4) > initialization hangs on boot - I had to disable ahci and use SCSI or > IDE. I haven't noticed this on ESXi. Ah, ok - good to be aware of. I generally just use the default of SCSI for the VM hard disks. > I mostly used Fusion for testing and development for ESXi/vSphere but > I switched to OpenBSD VMM for most of the testing. Oh cool - I have been following VMM news but I was under the mistaken impression that it wasn't ready for production use. I need to make the time and sit down and read the man pages. > The situation in Azure is about the same as in AWS: we don't provide > OpenBSD images in the marketplaces or community images yet, but there > are scripts and howtos to create your OpenBSD VMs in Azure. This > might change as soon as we feel confident enough with the VM "layout" > and the (mandatory) agent. But, for now, use the tools from > unofficial external github projects: > > For AWS: > https://github.com/ajacoutot/aws-openbsd > > For Azure (also works in AWS and under VMM): > https://github.com/reyk/cloud-openbsd (create images with cloud-agent) > https://github.com/reyk/cloud-agent (an alternative to waagent in ports) > https://github.com/reyk/meta-data (test + boot cloud images under VMM) Thank you for the AWS-related guides. > But please note that we're currently trying to find ways to create VM > images that still provide the benefits of OpenBSD-style things like > KARL. The problem with pre-provisioned VM images is that they all > have the "same random values" in the filesystem, kernel, and libraries > where the installer usually makes each installation unique. A > pre-provisioned image is always the same, at least on first boot, > unless we create something that prepares or installs everything before > getting a new VM instance online. The first real* OpenBSD image on > Azure will probably be fully pre-provisioned, but maybe we switch to a > totally different model later. Ok - good point. > In summary, I think all x86 VM hypervisors are more or less supported. > Just like real hardware platforms, some of them have problems, and > others work better. But we're in a pretty good shape and it was an > interesting journey over the last years to get to this point. > > *) There is currently only my company's OpenBSD-based product in > Azure. Some PR got it wrong and announced that OpenBSD itself is now > available in Azure, but it is an appliance which is not plain OpenBSD. > I'm sorry for the unintended confusion. The reality is: OpenBSD is > now supported in Azure, you can create your own images for it, and > we're hoping to make real OpenBSD images available very soon. I remember seeing news about that in my general tech newsfeed (regarding OpenBSD on Azure), and I was surprised (in a good way!), but it's good to know what this means in terms of the actual implementation. - J

