Welcome

Hoster project documentation

Hoster Core project is fully OpenSource and hosted on GitHub here: HosterCore GitHub.

Hoster is in a very active development at this stage, and it's guaranteed to have breaking changes. Every new GitHub release will include a description with a changelog, and any steps you need to take as a system administrator in order to make your systems compatible with the latest version.

With that said, it's a VM hypervisor that needs to support high uptime for the underlying VMs, so as long as you don't blindly update your systems - everything will be running just fine. We have got some VMs operational and up-and-running since 2021, when the first iteration of Hoster was written using Python3.

Brief Introduction

Introducing Hoster 🚀 - VM management framework that will make your life easier. Whether you're an experienced sysadmin or just starting out, Hoster has got you covered. With the firewall that affects every VM individually (without the need for VLANs), ZFS dataset level encryption (so your data is safe in co-location), and instant VM deployments (a new VM can be deployed in less than 1 second), Hoster is designed to help you get your work done quickly and efficiently. And that's not all - built-in and easy to use replication (based on ZFS send/receive) also gives Hoster the ability to offer very reliable, asynchronous VM replication between 2 or more hosts, ensuring data safety and high availability 🛡️

Built using modern, rock solid and battle tested technologies like Go, FreeBSD, bhyve, ZFS, and PF, Hoster is a highly opinionated system that puts an emphasis on ease of use and speed of VM deployments. Whether you're managing a small home lab or a large-scale production, Hoster can easily accommodate your environment 🧑🏼‍💻

The why?

My entire perspective on virtualization completely changed when I stumbled upon FreeBSD and bhyve. The potential of combining FreeBSD, bhyve, pf, and ZFS became abundantly clear to me. However, as I explored existing solutions like vm-bhyve and CBSD, I couldn't help but feel that they didn't quite match up to my expectations. It was this realization that inspired me to embark on a journey to create Hoster — a platform that seamlessly integrates bhyve, PF, and ZFS into a powerful virtualization solution. You can effortlessly deploy Hoster on any hardware, keeping RAM and CPU usage to a minimum. Give it a try and let me know your thoughts. Your input fuels our continuous project improvements.

Leveraging modern SD-WAN and VPN technologies for scalable Hoster networks

Hoster supports a variety of overlay network technologies like ZeroTier, Nebula, WireGuard, IPSec, OpenVPN, etc. Essentially Hoster supports anything FreeBSD supports. We haven't implemented any tight coupling in terms of networking. Both, VMs and Jails, are connected to the outside world using the bridge adapters, so as long as your VPN/SD-WAN supports a bridge mode you'll be fine.

Cheatsheet - VM Status (state) icons

** Only production VMs will be included in the start-all, snapshot-all, replicate-all, etc

Are there any plans to develop a WebUI?

Yes, part of the project roadmap includes the development of a WebUI. The WebUI will serve as a user-friendly interface to interact with the system and control multiple hoster nodes simultaneously. While currently not the highest priority due to time constraints, I am open to exploring this feature further with increased community engagement and potential investment.

Our paying customers already have access to an early version of the WebUI, that looks like this:

The main idea behind our WebUI is to keep things simple. We are not aiming to be yet another XenSever/Proxmox feature clone: the WebUI will do basic things like managing and deploying new VMs, displaying monitoring information for the VMs and Hosts, managing VM snapshots, connecting to VNC, etc. Everything else in terms of configuration and Hoster management still happens on the CLI.

OS Support

List of supported OSes

Stargazers over time