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Pretty much exactly that, yes. There's nothing you can do in FreeBSD that you can't do with Linux, and most of the time, it's going to be easier in Linux. Also, offering FreeBSD jails requires that the person running the business knows FreeBSD, which not many people do. Then, on top of that, there's no easy-to-use control panel like SolusVM (at least not that I'm aware of).
There is only one company I know that offers FreeBSD Jail. I wonder how their panel looks like. Could be self made.
But there are people who signs up for KVM just because of BSDs right?
Well actually it would be not because of fewer FreeBSD users, but rather because you cannot really set limits on CPU and Memory usage of each Jail. You can restrict HDD storage by creating each jail mounted to their own zfs pool (but zfs is nearly half the speed of ufs on KVM).
For a single user who manages their own VPS (KVM/XEN), jails offer great isolation, but the total storage/cpu/memory is shared.
As far as people who sign up for KVM, the same would apply to Xen-HVM. But there's also companies who specialize specifically on BSD VPSes such as RootBSD that offer FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD options on Xen-based VPSes.
I have a personal VPS with RootBSD 9 (x86) running a database, web, and dev jail, and I also run my other sites on KVM running FreeBSD 9.0p4 (64bit) with VPSNodeBox utilizing a single jail behind NAT. Both my VPSes at RootBSD and VPSNodeBox utilize ezjail-admin to contain my webserver/database/development jails.
Offering just Jails logins, isn't much different than companies that simply offer 'shell' accounts.
EDIT: You can get the status of FBSD Jail progress from this link. http://wiki.freebsd.org/Jails As you'll see CPU/Memory limits is marked currently as not fully working. As you can imagine the inability to set that would make it unattractive to offer people. You can expect better support for it in FreeBSD 9.1 and eventually 10 as tools like RCTL are matured.
When I check at http://vds6.net/ their BSD jail offers seems can limit cpu, and they even throttle it to xxx mhz.
I've used a FreeBSD jails VPS before. It was a russian hosting company. They are the authors of Bill/VDS/IPSManager (panels for VDS, Billing and Hosting), and use it to manage it. They was definately able to limit my CPU by MHz.
But I can see they are offering same plans for OpenVZ-based VPSes. I.e. they can limit CPU there too. Didn't tried that to see how it works. Might be a commercial version of OpenVZ (Virtuozzo?).
EDIT: nvm, most likely they do it with 'cpulimit'
The only good thing about jails I've found is that VDS template files doesn't accounted to my used space. But same can be done with OpenVZ and something like UnionFS probably.
@nstorm limiting cpu-units in OpenVz is nothing new, though I'm curious how exactly they pulled off CPU limiting to an exact mhz on FreeBSD 8.3 (russian patch last I checked). Also those VPSes are IPv6 only.
@kbeezie they was able to do it even on FreeBSD 6.3 long time ago (I'm talking about russian VPS). Probably using some of those patches. But the site where it was are currently down:
Resource limit for Jails (CPU, memory, filedesc, process) patch by Menshikov Konstantin
@nstorm while the dmesg shows the name of the CPU as 500mhz:
hw.machine: amd64
hw.model: Virtual CPU 500 MHZ
hw.ncpu: 1
hw.machine_arch: amd64"
I'm currently trying a VDS with them to determine what's what, I suspect it's not a jail but a vm/vps. But will know soon as I can get virt-what on there.
@jcaleb
The main reason why FreeBSD jails aren't popular for sale is because of design. It wasn't designed to provide VPSes for sale, it was designed for system administrators to isolate an environment inside a FreeBSD box for testing or acting as a separate server.
FreeBSD jails effectively is a completely chrooted environment. It's basically what OpenVZ is to Linux, except OpenVZ was designed to sell VPSes, FreeBSD wasn't. So the development of OpenVZ went the commercial way, whereas FreeBSD jails went more towards improving basic functionality and critical bugfixes. Thus the lack of CPU/RAM control during the initial phase (and till now, only partial), no control panel (but has a external toolkit for easy deployment).
Only pity is that FreeBSD is ridiculously stable, if there's a kernel panic there's usually an obviously good reason like hardware issue, rarely anything software. I have a customer on FreeBSD 4.11 and it basically just works. Can't say the same for linux. pfft
@kenshin s/was designed/wasn't designed/
@kbeezie I've found an info on their site. Their VDSManager for FreeBSD comes with a modified kernel which offers these additional features.
You can get a free 2 week trial of that product.
Here is a complete list of changes to the kernel they did (google translated):
The developers of our company have been serious work on processing kernel FreeBSD. To the extent that support for virtualization operating system FreeBSD was brought to a new level.
The following is a list of major changes that touched upon the standard kernel FreeBSD:
CPU support restrictions for the virtual environment.
support limitations of memory for the virtual environment, with large-stop system processes when the limit is exceeded.
personal settings to swap (swap): limits the use of the statistics.
file system based on templates.
support disk quotas within the virtual environment.
support limits on the number of processes.
support limits on the number of open handles (files, sockets, etc.).
the ability to bind multiple IP-addresses to a virtual environment.
sysctl settings: Hide unnecessary, added necessary.
is the ability to change all limits "on the fly."
Support for personal ipfw (firewall) for each virtual environment.
Support full personal sysV.
Corrected, thanks.
@nstorm
One thing about FreeBSD is the original kernel code is pretty much well tested by the community, and like I said from example, ridiculously stable. Adding in patches that screw around with the kernel in areas where I least want people touching around, and not as widely tested as the original kernel, is a worrying factor. Not to mention the kernel is constantly updated to support new hardware and patches, not sure how fast VDS can keep up.
While there's an estimated 20% penalty running FreeBSD on KVM, I'd do that rather than use a provider doing it on FreeBSD jails.
@nstorm So far the only indication I'm seeing of 500mhz is in the name of the virtual CPU.
sysctl is showing real memory of 9.6GB, user memory of 7.3GB, but physmem of 128MB (from 134217728).
But course you could just get a KVM VPS and install FreeBSD and set up your own jails for a decent price. But I guess the attractiveness of just logging into a jail is it already being installed and ready to go (that and 1$ a month...) , there's quite a few commands I can't run due to certain jail securities (socket stuff, etc)
Least in that manner, having your own KVM VPS with FreeBSD you can configure the kernel how you want, set up virtio support, add on Linux-Binary-Compatibility, and set up your own jails for specific needs, at under $10/month pretty easily from most LET providers.
Besides custom kernels are um... iffy especially if you're still stuck on the 8x branch of FreeBSD (well... least 8.3 is still marked as a current production version along side 9.0p4)
By the way do you have a link to that software? URLs I've tried off of their site aside from their own seem to die for me.
By the way... why ipfw when you got the "POWA" of pf ?
PS: The performance of the 128MB VDS acount at the german location seems to be performing rather decently when I was installing various things via ports.
@kbeezie http://ispsystem.com/en/software/vdsmanager/demo
Take a look at first screenie btw. It shows a VPS setup dialog where you can set CPU MHz.
Btw pricing there are with support. You can get a cheaper licenses without support from their partners (as low as €21.75/mo or €142.5/lifetime).
Their software is very popular among RU hosting companies.
@nstorm not bad that they have a lifetime price. It mentions "VDSmanager-FreeBSD - FreeBSD 8.3 and later", though I wonder if it would be compatible with 9.0/9.1, and if there's room to be able to re-compile the kernel with extra customizations needed... however I doubt you can if they have a pre-compiled kernel.
@kbeezie yeah, seems like they decided to keep their patches proprietary/closed-source. Offering only pre-compiled kernel.
And as for the kernel customization they are clearly stated this is not possible with VDSManager on their forums.
But their VDS hosting offers currently a FreeBSD 9 template, so looks like they have ported their patches there too.
@nstorm yea except if I do it I'd want to least be able to linux-binary-compatibility enabled (which is normally a default just needs to be enabled with the base files installed on the host node) and some other lil tid bits.
The main negativity of course is that, it would be kind of hard sell when easier/more-familiar platforms exist. But as you said they're popular in Russia, as 'shell accounts' were popular there long before they were else where.
I think I might keep the VDS-128 account there, never know when I may need shell access from germany (even though it's IPv6-only).
Thanks @Kenshin @kbeezie @nstorm for all the information. My impression is that the VDS offering could be more stable than OVZ.
@jcaleb well the nice thing is, they're just cheap enough to play with, sure no public IPv4, but I can think of some handy uses when all my other VPSes have IPv6 access.
Simply because it takes more time to manage freebsd system, especially initial setup. That's why people choose linux over bsd. BUT! Once you finish the initial setup it never does down or breaks. I have never seen server go down because of software/kernel issue with FreeBSD Jail. It's always hardware. And one more BUT: FreeBSD ports are more up-to-date and contain more latest software compared to linux.
For example in our case if we ever wanted to open a managed vps hosting project we would choose freebsd 9. I'm personally thinking about it.
I hope I get time to study BSDs.
@VDS6 not sure I can agree with "more time to manage", initially perhaps especially when you're installing most of your stuff from ports. But once you got the know-how nailed down, it's actually bout the same if not faster to deal with than most linux distros.
Maybe @VDS6 is referring to higher learning curve vs linux
@jcaleb shrug maybe, but I don't know of too many linux distros that have as nearly a concise reasource as the FreeBSD Handbook, and some commands that just seem to make sense (ie: sockstat -l , vs netstat). If you're starting fresh on either it doesn't seem like one would take more than the other.
@kbeezie ohh yes, the handbook is very good. btw, how would anyone compare stability of debian vs freebsd?
@jcaleb as I've used both (debian being my preferred distro on linux), I'd say debian 6 has been plenty stable, but freebsd 9 in the end was faster, cleaner and less memory usage than debian in the same kind of configuration. I prefer freebsd ports vs apt-get, the latest version of nginx, php-fpm etc is already provided in the ports library with an ASCII graphical gui for the ports configuration.
So stability isn't really in question, more usability/performance/availability.
thank you @kbeezie