Using bhyve with vagrant

The following describes how to set up bhyve with Vagrant using the vagrant-bhyve plugin.

Prerequisites

You will need

FreeBSD >= 11.0
A bhyve [capable CPU] 1
For this tutorial a clean /etc/pf.conf (XXX check if that's really needed)
A working internet connection to download the vagrant boxes

Preparing the system

To use bhyve you first need to load the vmm.ko kernel module:

# kldload vmm

If you want to load this module at boot time, add it to the list of modules in /etc/rc.conf:

# sysrc kld_list+="vmm"

Install a couple of needed packages:

# pkg install sudo dnsmasq linuxfdisk qemu-utils vagrant rubygem-vagrant-mutate rubygem-vagrant-bhyve grub2-bhyve coreutils linuxfdisk

Install the vagrant plugins

I do not know if these steps are correct (we already installed the vagrant-bhyve and vagrant-mutate packages in the last step) but without installing the plugins the bhyve provider cannot be found.

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-bhyve
$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-mutate

Download a (Virtualbox) vagrant box

Now it's time to download a vagrant box, for example a Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) box:

$ vagrant box add ubuntu/trusty64 --provider virtualbox

Convert the box from Virtualbox to bhyve

We only have a Virtualbox box, so we need to convert (mutate) the box into the bhyve format and remove the Virtualbox one:

$ vagrant mutate ubuntu/trusty64 bhyve
$ vagrant box remove ubuntu/trusty64 --provider virtualbox

Initialize and start your first vagrant-bhyve box

We now start the first vagrant-bhyve box!

$ mkdir -p ~/vagrant/trusty64
$ cd ~/vagrant/trusty64
$ vagrant init ubuntu/trusty64
$ vagrant up --provider bhyve

You should see some output that the box is being started. Depending on your sudo(1) configuration you are prompted for your user password, because some tasks (starting pf, dnsmasq and bhyve) need root credentials.

SSH'ing into the box

The last step is to ssh in to the freshly created and started box:

$ vagrant ssh

And voilà , you should be greeted by the Ubuntu VM.

bsdlme/vagrant-bhyve.md