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ESXi for pfsense + Server 2008?

T

tgs

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 9, 2011
Messages
91
So I just pulled the trigger on a nice little R710 server to replace my frankenstein of a server that I've been upgrading from spare parts since, well, forever. Had some issues recently and decided to go with a nice vendor solution this time (especially since there's an offer of a free 2nd processor upgrade {fyi, the site is a bit weird and won't let you configure the free upgrade with all processors but my rep managed to get it to work on his end, only paid the $20 upgrade cost for the second}).


Anyway, so with that I had planned to set up my old frankenstein into an underclocked, undervolted pfsense box until I ran into ESXi. I'm wondering if having pfsense and Server 2008 running on the R710 via ESXi or something similar would be a better route for me to take.

This is all in a home environment of course. Server 2008 isn't going to need both processors for what I'll have it doing. So I'm wondering if there are any of you out there who think this either 1. wouldn't work, or 2. think it's a terrible fucking idea (please let me know why though, always willing to learn).

Most likely once I get my R710 I'll still play around with ESXi and start learning that, but this idea seemed doable to me at least in theory.
 
It'll work, and work just fine. It'll barely even use either processor for that too.
 
pfsense works great under vpshere 5. i am running 2.0RC3, not the old 1.2.3. vmware tools works perfectly too...
 
+1 for pfSense on ESXi. Works great with minimal resources, I also run 2.0RC3 x64, the single cpu build.
 
I have a bunch of pfSense 2.0 Final Release boxes running on a mix of ESXi 4.1U1 and ESXi 5 boxes, all work great without issue.
 
Oh snap Final Release, time to upgrade. Still waiting for a fully featured vmxnet3 driver.
 
interesting, I didn't know e1000 could go above 1Gb but it makes sense since there is no PHY.
 
Precisely - there is no phy to limit the actual speed. And the opensolaris driver has been rock solid - whereas the OS vmxnet3 driver blows...
 
I personally use all E1000s for my *nix/BSD boxes and vmxnet3s for my windows boxes. I find that that even when you can install the vmware tools you still have issues with the vmxnet3 in *nix.
 
I think I am going to try this later tonight. I would like to get pf-sense and freenas running on the same machine, killing that old p4 that has been running my gateway for a long time.
 
I hit a bug with pfSense 2.0 and vSphere 5..had someone else confirm it for me. It was showing way higher CPU than it was actually using due to a bug in device polling. Let me know if you see that. I used the OVF file for deployment.

EDIT: Bug is in the pfSense driver....not vSphere.
 
Huh, I never knew there was a template. I just installed from ISO and tweaked it.
 
I didn't see the 2.x template on their site...do you have link?
 
Got all my hopes up..lol..no biggie..i'm sure the ISO is easy as well..:)
 
Honestly, pfsense is so easy to install and configure, I never bothered to check for a template.
 
Yeah. Just do the ISO. Takes all of 3 mins and there is a package for Open Tools right in the GUI.

I've since switched to Untangle.
 
The ISO easy, but I did get confused when it asked me to pick the kernel and there was no non-SMT choice that made sense.

NetJunkie, have you tried Astaro yet? It's really slick.
 
I did...but I like Untangle and the other stuff it has. My 3.5yo is growing up fast..already has his own iPad and iMac and I want web filtering and other stuff for him.
 
NetJunkie said:
I hit a bug with pfSense 2.0 and vSphere 5..had someone else confirm it for me. It was showing way higher CPU than it was actually using due to a bug in device polling. Let me know if you see that. I used the OVF file for deployment.

EDIT: Bug is in the pfSense driver....not vSphere.
Click to expand...

Which driver are you talking about? The VMWare tools driver for pfsense?

Also, does this mean it will take CPU away from the other VMs? Or is this only a reporting problem?
 
shiznit said:
The ISO easy, but I did get confused when it asked me to pick the kernel and there was no non-SMT choice that made sense.

NetJunkie, have you tried Astaro yet? It's really slick.
Click to expand...

I actually switched to astaro a couple of weeks ago. Saved me having to run another mail proxy :)
 
Rectal Prolapse said:
Which driver are you talking about? The VMWare tools driver for pfsense?

Also, does this mean it will take CPU away from the other VMs? Or is this only a reporting problem?
Click to expand...

The Intel E1000 driver included in the install. Yes, it will take away from other VMs as it's using CPU time to poll. By flipping device polling, as mentioned in that thread, you'll see the CPU use drop in vCenter by a great deal.

From people that do more with FreeBSD on VMware...I'm told not to use other drivers (VMXNET, etc). There are issues with that and to stick with E1000. I could run a lot of data through pfSense and peg two cores no problem...flip device polling around and it was maybe 1/4 of that.
 
What is the benefit of polling? If the firewall VM goes down one should know fairly soon...
 
You're asking a question I can't answer. I don't write hardware drivers. I just know which option to flip in the pfSense GUI to temporarily fix it.

I'd like to see SMP support for VMware FT now. That way I could have instant failover of my Untangle box.
 
NetJunkie said:
You're asking a question I can't answer. I don't write hardware drivers. I just know which option to flip in the pfSense GUI to temporarily fix it.

I'd like to see SMP support for VMware FT now. That way I could have instant failover of my Untangle box.
Click to expand...
No problem.

As for FT, can't you just run 2 instances of Untangle and use the built-in HA to failover?
 
shiznit said:
No problem.

As for FT, can't you just run 2 instances of Untangle and use the built-in HA to failover?
Click to expand...

Untangle doesn't work like that. Right now VMware HA will restart the Untangle VM on another host should the host it resides on fails..but it takes a few minutes. With VMware FT it would be instant and not even drop connections.

Untangle offers no cluster type HA itself.
 
Sounds like another look at Astaro is in order, I'm confident the content filtering is up to par, maybe not as intuitive.
 
I like it. It's got all kinds of goodies. I don't run the web filtering stuff because it's too heavyweight (I run malware/virus stuff on the various PCs), but I use the inbound smtp proxy, which has a very nice spam quarantine feature...
 
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