[antranigv]

OVAs are basically ZIP files with some XML. If you want, you can convert an OVA to RAW image or VMDK or whatever the latest fancy format is, and bhyve can boot that for you. Better to use Raw.

bhyve, unlike other "famous" hypervisors is pretty stable, has good enough virtualized drivers (altho I'm sure Oxide has made it better) and can boot a VM with 1.5 TB of RAM and 240 vCPU[1]. Something I was not able to do with anything other than bhyve.

I know this is HackerNews, so I have to say it, marketing != engineering. Just because the FreeBSD project's marketing suck, doesn't mean engineering is bad. usually it better than the mainstream ones.

1: https://antranigv.am/posts/2023/10/bhyve-cpu-allocation-256/

[tw04]

There's two parts to the question. There's the file itself and the underlying hardware. The wiki is pretty light on details, does it actually support emulating the same hardware as vmware? I'd assume no to the vmxnet devices but Intel E1000? Adaptec SCSI adapters? Similar USB and VGA?

A lot of the vendor-provided OVAs cut out a bunch of hardware support with the assumption that they only need to support vmware emulated hardware.