Create FreeBSD Virtual Systems

Introduction

Cloudmin versions 7.0 and above have the ability to fully manage virtual systems running FreeBSD under KVM. Almost all the same features that are available for Linux systems are supported, except for resizing filesystems. Older Cloudmin releases allowed you to create a FreeBSD system, but did not have the ability to set its root password or IP address, or manage network interfaces and virtual disks.

Host Requirements

Before a host machine can host a FreeBSD system it must satisfy the following requirements :

  1. The kernel must be compiled with read/write support for the UFS filesystem. The kernel config file option for this is CONFIG_UFS_FS_WRITE=y . To check if this is enabled in your host's running kernel, run grep CONFIG_UFS_FS_WRITE /boot/config-$(uname -r)

  2. The host must have the UFS tools for Linux package installed. On Debian / Ubuntu systems, this can be done with the command apt-get install ufsutils . Unfortunately, no similar standard package appears to exist for CentOS or Redhat systems. However, we have created a TAR file of the required commands that can be installed with :

cd /usr/local/bin
wget -O - http://cloudmin.virtualmin.com/gpl/ufsutils.tar.gz | tar xzf -

Limitations

In version 7.0 of Cloudmin there are some functions that are not available for FreeBSD virtual systems :

  1. When creating a system, the first disk cannot be re-sized to be larger or smaller than the default size from the image. This is due to lack of support on Linux systems for manipulating FreeBSD partition tables.

  2. After creation a virtual disk cannot be resized from its initial size. This is due to bugs in the growfs.ufs command included with Debian Linux ( see http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=632832 )