Dear all,
I am seeking for people that run OpenBSD 4.1 on ESX servers and want to
share their experiences =)
To make sure that I won't provoke replies like 'idiot, virtualization
subverts the safety of OpenBSD' I hereby declare that I do not want to
use this for productive systems (...not). Furtermore, I know that
OpenBSD is not officially supported on ESX.
When it comes to discussing OpenBSD on ESX, people often write stuff
like "it runs just fine when I use the e1000 network if emulation".
In my experience, things are not so clear. OK, using the e1000 is a must
(the vlance driver does not properly work with the emulation done by
ESX, probably an issue with the PCN_NTXSEGS value (16) in if_pcn.c)).
However, using the e1000 emulation is also not trouble free.
I played around with various VMs and sometimes the em driver suddenly
did not receive any packets anymore (and the packets it sent went to
nirvana). Link status etc. all OK. I observed this on an unpatched ESX
3.0.1. People tend to overreact in such cases (they reboot VMs), but in
at least one case I was able to intervene and to do a "ifconfig em0 down
&& ifconfig em0 up" - which helped.
Another issue is VGT mode (a must if you want to handle more than 4
vlans in a VM). Sometimes, incoming short ethernet frames get lost (I
know, this is very vague).
Any other experiences/observations/ideas?
- Christian