BoxyBSD Returns to FreeBSD: Migrating from Proxmox VE to Sylve with bhyve | gyptazy

NAME

gyptazy - BoxyBSD Returns to FreeBSD: Migrating from Proxmox VE to Sylve with bhyve

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

Learn why BoxyBSD migrated from Proxmox VE back to FreeBSD using the Sylve virtualization platform and bhyve. Discover the challenges, automation, monitoring, and lessons learned.

Some journeys don't end where you expect them to. Sometimes they bring you right back to where everything began, only with a lot more experience and a much better ecosystem waiting for you.

That's exactly what is happening with BoxyBSD.

When I first launched the project, the entire infrastructure was powered by FreeBSD and the bhyve hypervisor. It felt like the natural choice for a platform dedicated to promoting BSD operating systems. The stack was lightweight, stable, and aligned perfectly with the philosophy behind BoxyBSD. Unfortunately, the surrounding ecosystem simply wasn't ready for the level of automation and operational maturity I wanted to achieve.

As BoxyBSD continued to grow, I needed features such as seamless live migrations, centralized cluster management, and fully automated provisioning. At that time, Proxmox offered a much more complete solution. Although the migration away from FreeBSD was not an easy decision, it allowed me to transform BoxyBSD into a highly automated platform capable of operating across multiple locations with minimal manual intervention.

Ironically, moving to Proxmox VE meant building many of the features I had expected to already exist.<br>Over the years I developed a significant amount of tooling around Proxmox to bridge those gaps. ProxLB brought VMware DRS like dynamic resource scheduling to Proxmox years before the platform introduced its own scheduler. ProxCLMC implemented an Enhanced vMotion Compatibility equivalent, allowing migrations across heterogeneous CPU generations, just like ProxSnap added a centralized way of snapshot management to Proxmox clusters. I also developed multiple Ansible modules to automate cluster deployment, creation & joining as well as node management for certificate and subscription management, just next to automate storage integrations of various storage types. I also created automated patching workflows (ProxPatch), and even maintained source code patches for Proxmox itself. One particularly memorable example was adding support for tagged VLANs during unattended installations, a feature that was essential for my deployment model but unavailable at the time.

Those projects eventually became open source and are now used by many people far beyond the BoxyBSD infrastructure. Looking back, the temporary move to Proxmox unexpectedly resulted in a whole ecosystem of tools that contributed back to the community. ProxLB quickly became a very interesting and largly used tool which caused questions in enterprises, if this could be managed by a single person for a longer time. After my ProxLB project even got showcased on the dutch CT magazine and the Dutch Proxday by the Tuxis, I gifted this project to the credativ GmbH for a better long-term maintainibility by a team. In the meantime, I got somehow part of the PegaProx project which adds all the features to a centrlaized web-ui which became similar to the vCenter - just for the Proxmox ecosystem. If all of this sounds interesting, you can find more about all those things in my blog post HOW BOXYBSD BOOSTED THE PROXMOX ECOSYSTEM WITH FREE VPS HOSTING.

While all of this was happening, I never stopped following the progress of another project that had quietly been evolving in the BSD world: Sylve.

Sylve webinterface

Hayzam's work on Sylve immediately caught my attention because it pursued a very similar vision to Proxmox, but built around FreeBSD and bhyve. Instead of treating bhyve as just another hypervisor, Sylve provides a modern management platform with clustering, automation, and a user experience that feels immediately familiar to Proxmox administrators while remaining deeply rooted in the BSD ecosystem. During the first development times, I already covered Sylve in one of my blog posts.

With every release, Sylve matured rapidly. Once it finally reached a stable release and became available through the official FreeBSD pkg and ports tree, it became clear that the ecosystem had reached the point I had been waiting for.<br>After several years running BoxyBSD on Proxmox, it was finally time to come home.

EuroBSDCon 2025 Sylve Talk

This article documents that journey: migrating the complete BoxyBSD infrastructure back to its BSD roots, replacing Proxmox with FreeBSD, bhyve, and Sylve, and exploring what the modern BSD virtualization ecosystem is capable of today.

Challenges

Moving BoxyBSD back to bhyve was much more than simply replacing one hypervisor with another. In fact, the hypervisor itself was probably the easiest part of the whole migration. The real challenge was everything surrounding it. During the...