• EnterpriseWorkingGroup

Enterprise Working Group

CHARTER

The mission of the Enterprise WG is to bring clarity to feature and other gaps that limit enterprise (e.g. business or end user) adoption of FreeBSD as a general-purpose server platform and provide a supportive group to help developers close these gaps. For our purposes, we are defining general purpose enterprise server as servers used by businesses and other organizations to support business applications and end users. Typical applications include Active Directory, Samba, kerberos, ERP and other apps often written in Java, and increasingly AI workloads and cloud native apps.

The Scope of the WG is: For the remainder of 2023, the WG will focus on the set of features identified initially and refined during the WG’s first meetings. The WG will also concern itself with onboarding a semi-permanent group of developers and users to look after the ongoing utility of FreeBSD for general purpose enterprise server workloads.

Our success metrics are:

• Staffed development plans for high priority projects
• Steady to growing number of WG participants who perform a growing diversity of tasks
• Feature updates in priority projects
• Greater utility by current enterprise users
• Increased adoption of FreeBSD as a general purpose enterprise server platform

• More support for FreeBSD by “critical” enterprise tech & resources, such as XDR vendors, CIS benchmarks

The deliverables are:

• Improved satisfaction among enterprise users
• Documentation of WG progress and deployment/use best practices
• WG community growth
• Growing support for FreeBSD by critical enterprise tech vendors

We operate according to the FreeBSD Code of Conduct

Status

By end of 2023, the working group has grown to 69 members. Following gaps were identified:

Workstream status as of Jan 16 2024

Participation

This group is open to anyone who would like to contribute in support of its charter. We previously used Google Groups to communicate but as of 12/04/2023 we have switched to an official FreeBSD mailing list.

To join the mailing list, please go to the signup form to subscribe. Only registered subscribers can send to the mailing list.

We need all kinds of perspectives and expertise - developers, end users, project managers, testers. Questions please email greg at freebsdfoundation dot org

Our Next Workgroup Call

The next call has not been scheduled yet. Please sign up with the work group via the the mailing list signup form to receive the next meeting link.

The agenda for the next call:

• bhyve / jails manageability from Chris M
• OCI runtime from Greg W
• OpenJDK contractor status from me or Joe M
• GPU and AI support from Greg W

Workstreams

OCI runtime

• The following people have volunteered to help:
  • Johannes Kunde - end user, helping create the Product Requirements Document
  • John Hixson - Developer willing to help
  • Ian Evans - CTO of Metify - Developer and end user also weighing in on the PRD
  • Kyle Wilcox - Chief Software Architect of Metify - Developer
  • Doug Rabson - Developer

• Here is the link to the DRAFT PRD: OCI PRD

• Doug Rabson opened a PR on November 10 to propose an OCI Working Group to develop a FreeBSD runtime: Github and dfr's proposal for a working group

bhyve manageability

• The following people have volunteered to help:

  • Chris Moerz - PM

  • Michael Dexter - user and bhyve community manager

• Here is the link to the DRAFT PRD: bhyve management PRD

• Here is the link to the spreadsheet on desired features: Desired bhyve features

• Activities (see also Bhyve (and jails) management workstream)

  • Updating the FreeBSD handbook around bhyve virtualization - already landed

  • Updating the byve man page - see D43940

  • Minimum Viable Product scoping - in a recent call on 2024/02/08, the following items were identified as viable topics to follow up
    • Junior Admin Tasks
      • Start/stop VMs
      • Create a VM
      • Resource analytics
      • Snapshot the backing storage
      • Move VMs between hosts
      • Attach to a console, even read-only. Is there a panic on screen?

      • Beyond the SAC> on Windows Server… what OSs do NOT support a console?

      • With Capture!
      • This has become more complex on GNU/Linux, settings are easily nuked by updates
    • Tooling to help new users to get started and interact with bhyve
      • Port the Proxmox GUI? TrueNAS?
      • Anyone using Webmin?
      • Salt Stack? Chris has a module for managed Jails that could be opened
      • Ansible? (module by module or first stage/playbooks or pull mode or web interfaces)
      • Chef! CF Engine! Puppet!

      • Cockpit Project

  • Attending weekly bhyve call as best as I can - if you are interested in talking or joining the calls, please get in touch; my contact details are on my page.

  • as of 01/2024, we have an initial reference implementation for "vmstated" (see GitHub), a user space daemon for managing and monitoring bhyve virtual machines.

    • It is meant as "brain teaser" to further the conversation about process supervision

    • It can be compiled from source or installed via ports (sysutils/vmstated)

    • It certainly has a lot of room for improvement coding and capabilities wise - you are welcome to give feedback either via email, Github or joining the weekly calls

AD/DNS

• The following people have volunteered to help:
  • Michael Osipov - end user
  • Greg Wallace - PM
• Next step is to hold a kick-off call.

NVIDIA GPU support

• The following people have volunteered to help:
  • Vedran Miletic - end user
  • Zoran Vujovic - tester with Supermicro
  • Jason Morris - tester Azure
  • Greg Wallace - PM
  • Ian Evans - CTO of Metify - Developer and end user also weighing in on the PRD
  • Kyle Wilcox - Chief Software Architect of Metify - Developer
• Next step is to get a volunteer to drive the completion of the first draft of the PRD, collect feedback, update and finalize.

Java / OpenJDK

• The FreeBSD Foundation opened a position to bring on a contractor to do this work OpenJDK Contract

Samba 4.x

• The following people have volunteered to help:
  • Michael Osipov - end user
  • Greg Wallace - PM
  • John Hixson - developer
• Next step is to assess the patch situation and come up with a plan to approach upstream

• The FreeBSD Foundation is discussing how to get FreeBSD added to .NET CI so that GitHub Actions can support it

• Update January 2024: lang/dotnet - Microsoft .NET programming framework successfully ported to FreeBSD

smbfs 2.0/3.0

• The FreeBSD Foundation is working on getting a donation of this code (code contribution, re-licensing under BSD license)

Completed and archived tasks

1. Assess interest in an Enterprise WG - The Google Group now has 69 members
2. Charter the WG
3. Compiling list of gaps
4. Prioritize feature list
5. Assign/volunteer - IN PROGRESS. See Workstreams above

Feature priorities

The following prioritization was established in 2023:

Resources

• Meeting Notes

• First meeting

  • slides

  • recording

• Second meeting

  • slides

  • recording

• Third meeting

  • slides

• Fourth meeting

  • included in the minutes

  • slides

  • recording

• Fifth meeting

  • slides

  • bhyve+jails slides

  • recording

CategoryProject