General Information

HosterRed: HyperVisor is a highly opinionated VM management framework, which includes: network isolation (at the VM level), dataset encryption (at the ZFS level), instant VM deployments, storage replication between 2 or more hosts and more. It uses Python3, FreeBSD, bhyve, ZFS, and PF to achieve all of it's goals ✅🚀.

The why?

For a long time I've been a Proxmox user, swearing by it and promoting it any way I could. That stopped when I've started to rent Hetzner hardware servers, as many problems risen up: unjustifiably high RAM usage on smaller servers, no integrated NAT configuration, multiple public IP management is a nightmare, and some other minor issues like root ZFS dataset encryption on BIOS systems. That's when I discovered FreeBSD and bhyve: I realized that I could just use PF to control the traffic between the VMs and internal/external bridges, use native ZFS encryption, and do so much more but there was only 1 small problem -- vmbhyve and CBSD just weren't what I needed. Meet HosterRed -- my own automation framework (or even a small ecosystem, if you will) around FreeBSD's bhyve, PF and ZFS. As a result I can deploy the VMs in a matter of seconds on any hardware old/new/powerfull or otherwise with minimal RAM overhead.

To network all of the nodes together as one happy family of "hosters" I use Nebula (https://www.defined.net/nebula/).

Now HosterRed is used by a couple of individuals (including myself) as their hosting platform of choise. Install it, play around with it, and you will be pleasantly surprised by the experience.

P.S. WebUI is coming too, stay tuned for that 😉

VM Status (state) icons

🟢 - VM is running
🔴 - VM is stopped
💾 - VM is a backup from another node
🔒 - VM is located on the encrypted Datased
🔁 - Production VM icon: VM will be included in the autostart, automatic snapshots/replication, etc

OS Support

List of supported OSes

• Debian 11
• AlmaLinux 8
• Ubuntu 20.04
• FreeBSD 13 UFS
• FreeBSD 13 ZFS
• Windows 10 (You'll have to provide your own image, instructions on how to build one will be released in the Wiki section soon)

OSes on the roadmap

• Ubuntu 20.04 LVM Hardened
• Fedora (latest)
• CentOS 7
• OpenBSD
• OpenSUSE Leap
• OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
• Windows 11
• Windows Server 2019

OSes not on the roadmap

• MacOS (any release)

Quickstart Section

Backups

Sheduled automatic snapshots and replication for all production VMs

@hourly     root  hoster vm snapshot-all  --stype hourly  --keep 3
@daily      root  hoster vm snapshot-all  --stype daily   --keep 5
@weekly     root  hoster vm snapshot-all  --stype weekly  --keep 3
@monthly    root  hoster vm snapshot-all  --stype monthly --keep 6
20 * * * *  root  hoster vm replicate-all --ep-address 192.168.1.11