F.A.Q.

  • What is the difference to FreeBSD's jail?

    Jail hides or restricts resources from the imprisoned process groups, but does not provide any virtual resources. For many applications jail is a great solution, though.

  • What is the difference to virtualization Software XYZ?

    The difference of VPS to VMware's products, Xen, ..., is the level on which virtualization happens. VPS makes one FreeBSD kernel appear as many virtual instances. The products mentioned above run entire operating system kernels in a virtual environment, with the advantage of supporting many different operating systems, but the big disadvantage of high performance and resource impact. VPS can be compared to Virtuozzo/OpenVZ (Linux).

  • Can I use it for my production environment?

    Since VPS is currently considered ''beta'', basically meaning all features are implemented but bugs have to be expected, not yet.

  • How many instances can one physical box host?

    On an HP DL360 G4 (dual CPU, 2 GB ram) 600 instances run fine simultaneously. These contain a standard FreeBSD installation plus sshd enabled. Binaries and Libraries are shared.

  • When will it be included in FreeBSD?

    Difficult question. VPS has its code and little changes almost everywhere in the kernel, making it a really significant change and source of potential issues for FreeBSD. It exists as a project branch on svn.freebsd.org: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/projects/vps/.

  • I found a bug, what now?

    Please submit a detailed bug report to the mailing list (see Contact), including as much information as possible.

  • I am missing an important feature, what now?

    Please send an email to the mailing list (see Contact).

  • What about edge case XY?

    Live migration at the OS level involves loads of edge cases. As soon as a case appears to be significant it will be implemented. For unsupported edge cases live migration can't be done and offline migration has to be used instead.

  • How can I help?

    Please read the Contribute Page, there are many ways to help.