FreeBSD takes a major leap: bhyve gets live VM migration between hosts

The bhyve hypervisor in FreeBSD 15.1 now has a working implementation of live VM migration. This allows a running virtual machine to move between two physical host machines over a TCP connection with minimal disruption, pausing only briefly for a final stop-and-copy phase. The work builds on bhyve's existing experimental snapshot support and adds new dirty-page tracking in the kernel module.

For FreeBSD users and administrators, this is a foundational feature for enterprise virtualization. It enables routine host maintenance, hardware upgrades, load balancing, and failure management without significant VM downtime. The development is also critical for projects like Sylve, which aims to create a Proxmox-like virtualization platform for FreeBSD, and for services like BoxyBSD that offer VPS instances. The takeaway is that FreeBSD's native hypervisor is maturing into a serious, feature-complete contender for clustered virtualized environments.