In this repo, you will find all of the "canned templates" for creating VMs
on FreeNAS 10 - what you see when you use the vm template show command.
Here's the step-by-step process I used to create the FreeBSD-current (11.0) template, using freebsd-current as the starting image. I also used bhyve running on FreeBSD 10.3 as the bootstrap host, though some folks have reported good results with xhyve on the Mac.
- First, obviously, I needed to check out the vm-templates repo and start working in it:
git clone https://github.com/freenas/vm-templates.git
cd vm-templates.git
- Next, I copied the template that looked the most like my target template. In my case, since I was targetting another FreeBSD template, it was obvious enough to simply duplicate the existing FreeBSD 10.2-zfs template (a 10.2 install with the ZFS option selected).
cp -pr freebsd-10.2-zfs freebsd-11-zfs
- Then I grabbed an ISO installation image from ftp.freebsd.org, as linked above, and started the steps to get bhyve ready to boot it:
# Note: These initialization steps for bhyve are necessary to do only once.
kldload vmm
ifconfig tap0 create
sysctl net.link.tap.up_on_open=1
ifconfig bridge0 create
ifconfig bridge0 addm igb0 addm tap0 # replace igb0 with your primary NIC
ifconfig bridge0 up
# Now make a 16gb image file for the HD - this is referenced later, too.
truncate -s 16g disk.img
- Then I ran bhyve's helpful vmrun.sh script to start things off.
sh /usr/share/examples/bhyve/vmrun.sh -c 1 -m 1024M -t tap0 -d disk.img -i -I FreeBSD-11.0-CURRENT-amd64-20160518-r300097-disc1.iso freebsd-current
- At this point, FreeBSD's standard installer ran, the appropriate ZFS installation options were chosen, and I exited bhyve by selecting the loader prompt on the next reboot and typing "quit". This dropped me back to the shell on the host OS, where I was next able to do:
mv disk.img os.img
gzip -9 os.img
This last little rename/compress step was just to conform with the same naming conventions as my source template, at which point I then edited the template.json file in my new freebsd-11-zfs direcory to correctly reference this new image and edited some of the book-keeping fields to match, then I uploaded the os.img.gz file to the location specified in the url field (which could be any HTTP server you have access to) and filled in the sha256 checksum field by running shasum -a 256 os.img.gz and pasting in the results.
- Finally, I committed the result to github with a git commit / git push, since as a FreeNAS committer I have write access (non-freenas project members would send us a pull request), and voila! My FreeNAS 10 CLI now shows:
unix::>vm template show
Name Description
boot2docker boot2docker Docker host for FreeNAS
ubuntu-server-14.04 Ubuntu Server 14.04
ubuntu-cloud-14.04 Ubuntu Cloud Edition 14.04
freebsd-10.2-zfs FreeBSD 10.2 image with root on ZFS
freebsd-11-zfs FreeBSD 11-current image with root on ZFS
Demonstrating that the template list is automatically pulled from github.
- Of course, the final proof was to actually create a VM with the new template on my FreeNAS 10 box:
unix::>vm create name=bleedingedge template=freebsd-11-zfs enabled=yes volume=tank
unix::>vm bleedingedge start
unix::>vm bleedingedge console
Login is a root (no password), tada! Running FreeBSD-current from this new template.