In this repo, you will find all of the "canned templates" for creating VMs on FreeNAS 10 - what you see when you use the vm template show command.

If you would like to use an already created VM as your template do the following:

• Check out the repository

git clone https://github.com/freenas/vm-templates.git
cd vm-templates

• Copy and rename the folder from which your template was based on
• Stop the running VM and use dd on the FreeBSD CLI

dd if=/dev/zvol/[pool name]/vm/[VM Name]/os of=/mnt/[pool name]/[storage location]/disk.img bs=2M

• Then rename the image and compress it, this may take a while.

mv disk.img os.img
gzip -9 os.img

• This last little rename/compress step was just to conform with the same naming conventions as my source template, at which point I then edited the template.json file in the directory created previously to correctly reference this new image and edited some of the book-keeping fields to match, then I uploaded the os.img.gz file to the location specified in the url field (which could be any HTTP server you have access to) and filled in the sha256 checksum field by running shasum -a 256 os.img.gz and pasting in the results.
• Finally, commit the result to github with a git commit / git push, then add your github vm-templates repository under VM -> Settings in the form of https://github.com/[username]/vm-templates and voila! Your new template will now show up along with all the other templates.

Here's the step-by-step process I used to create the FreeBSD-current (11.0) template, using freebsd-current as the starting image. I also used bhyve running on FreeBSD 10.3 as the bootstrap host, though some folks have reported good results with xhyve on the Mac.

• First, obviously, I needed to check out the vm-templates repo and start working in it:

git clone https://github.com/freenas/vm-templates.git
cd vm-templates.git

• Next, you have to acquire the template disk image, I copied the template that looked the most like my target template. In my case, since I was targetting another FreeBSD template, it was obvious enough to simply duplicate the existing FreeBSD 10.2-zfs template (a 10.2 install with the ZFS option selected).

cp -pr freebsd-10.2-zfs freebsd-11-zfs

• Then I grabbed an ISO installation image from ftp.freebsd.org, as linked above, and started the steps to get bhyve ready to boot it:

# Note: These initialization steps for bhyve are necessary to do only once.
kldload vmm
ifconfig tap0 create
sysctl net.link.tap.up_on_open=1
ifconfig bridge0 create
ifconfig bridge0 addm igb0 addm tap0	# replace igb0 with your primary NIC
ifconfig bridge0 up

# Now make a 16gb image file for the HD - this is referenced later, too.
truncate -s 16g disk.img

• Then I ran bhyve's helpful vmrun.sh script to start things off.

sh /usr/share/examples/bhyve/vmrun.sh -c 1 -m 1024M -t tap0 -d disk.img -i -I FreeBSD-11.0-CURRENT-amd64-20160518-r300097-disc1.iso freebsd-current

• At this point, FreeBSD's standard installer ran, the appropriate ZFS installation options were chosen, and I exited bhyve by selecting the loader prompt on the next reboot and typing "quit". This dropped me back to the shell on the host OS, where I was next able to do:

mv disk.img os.img
gzip -9 os.img

This last little rename/compress step was just to conform with the same naming conventions as my source template, at which point I then edited the template.json file in my new freebsd-11-zfs direcory to correctly reference this new image and edited some of the book-keeping fields to match, then I uploaded the os.img.gz file to the location specified in the url field (which could be any HTTP server you have access to) and filled in the sha256 checksum field by running shasum -a 256 os.img.gz and pasting in the results.

• Finally, I committed the result to github with a git commit / git push, added my github vm-templates repository under VM -> Settings in the form of https://github.com/[username]/vm-templates and voila! My FreeNAS 10 CLI now shows:

unix::>vm template show
       Name                          Description                
boot2docker           boot2docker Docker host for FreeNAS       
ubuntu-server-14.04   Ubuntu Server 14.04                       
ubuntu-cloud-14.04    Ubuntu Cloud Edition 14.04                
freebsd-10.2-zfs      FreeBSD 10.2 image with root on ZFS       
freebsd-11-zfs        FreeBSD 11-current image with root on ZFS 

Demonstrating that the template list is automatically pulled from github.

• Of course, the final proof was to actually create a VM with the new template on my FreeNAS 10 box:

unix::>vm create name=bleedingedge template=freebsd-11-zfs enabled=yes volume=tank
unix::>vm bleedingedge start
unix::>vm bleedingedge console

Login is a root (no password), tada! Running FreeBSD-current from this new template.