[HN Gopher] Run Bhyve in FreeBSD jails - The view from inside th...
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       Run Bhyve in FreeBSD jails - The view from inside the forest (2020)
        
       Author : rodrigo975
       Score  : 56 points
       Date   : 2021-04-08 19:17 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (neirac.byteswizards.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (neirac.byteswizards.com)
        
       | tejado wrote:
       | I wonder how many nested VM inside jail inside a VM inside a
       | jail... are possible from a resource perspective, so that I can
       | still execute a shell
        
         | tonoto wrote:
         | For a second you lit up my hope that there would be nested
         | bhyve virtualization, but no. This is a different layer of
         | virtualization/containerization. In order to have nested vm the
         | correct cpu flags (vt-x) have to be exposed in the guest and I
         | believe that such feature is unfortunately not implemented yet.
        
         | kazen44 wrote:
         | you can nest jails quite a lot. Although i have not tried it
         | (and cannot find proper sources on the max limit of the amount
         | of jails you can inside a freebsd system).
         | 
         | might be fun to give it a try though.
        
       | cyberpunk wrote:
       | I am a fan of FreeBSD, and use it for a few tasks.. But I'm not
       | at all clear why someone would want to do this? Does anyone have
       | any idea what this gives you over just running a Bhyve VM outside
       | of a jail?
       | 
       | Is it more secure somehow?
        
         | UI_at_80x24 wrote:
         | It can be MUCH more secure to run it in a jail; but IMHO that's
         | not the point, but it could be.
         | 
         | There's also multiple types of security.
         | 
         | Running it in a jail allows you to do cool things, especially
         | when coupled with ZFS. This is about running & managing VM's.
         | 
         | Imagine you wanted to 'restore from day X', or restart each day
         | with the same config (i.e. testing Windows boxes for exploits),
         | or you wanted solid A/B tests and MS keeps installing updates
         | and moving your goalposts, or some funky abandoned software
         | only works if you have the calendar set to 1993, etc....)
         | 
         | You can do all of these things easily with JAILS + ZFS.
         | 
         | But IMHO the best reason to run something in a jail is to
         | isolate services.
         | 
         | On my file-server right now I have the following running in
         | different jails:
         | 
         | Plex
         | 
         | Windows10
         | 
         | WindowsXP
         | 
         | my Git server
         | 
         | my SAMBA server
         | 
         | DHCP
         | 
         | DNS/PiHole/ad-blocking
         | 
         | IRC server
         | 
         | Mumble server
         | 
         | 4 different FAMP servers for friends & family
         | 
         | I like to isolate each jail into the task it'll be handling.
         | That how it stays organized in my mind.
         | 
         | ZFS send & receive + jails makes backups and restoring
         | painless.
        
         | doublerabbit wrote:
         | Before FreeBSD 12, you couldn't expose the bhyve components in
         | a jail so you were forced to use the host as the bHyve
         | hypervisor and/or jails. The new feature of the latest FreeBSD
         | was a network stack within an jail.
         | 
         | With this stack, you can now assign an IP addresses to a jail.
         | No longer requiring you to maintain a rule-set via the firewall
         | while enabling you to operate as if the jail was the bare-metal
         | FreeBSD host.
         | 
         | Knowing that the bHyve VMs are isolated within their own jails
         | you can then hand those off to client as their own hypervisor
         | space. With that they can run their own network, appliances,
         | virtual machines while being isolated from anyone else with
         | confined limits without knowledge of the host they run on.
         | 
         | This enhances public security as at any time I can axe the jail
         | and everything is disabled; nor do I have to worry that the
         | rule-set created will brick anything else. The client also has
         | shell access in case of. And if a hacker breaks in to the bHyve
         | VM, exploits out, the hacker are isolated to jail and not the
         | hypervisor host.
         | 
         | Plus with the added bonus of ZFS, I can make snapshots or
         | backups of clients jails with ease.
        
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       (page generated 2021-04-08 23:00 UTC)