I run freenas under xen 4.3 and its work perfectly. It setup it that way because I had read comments that freenas works better that way.

On the Hypervisor side, depending on your background (Windows), Hyper-V is also a good alternative for pfSense (if using the custom pfSense ISO with integrated synthetic drivers, see "Hyper-V integration installed with pfSense 2.0.1" http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,56565.0.html). Hyper-V doesn't have some of the more advanced ESXi's features, specially third party management extensions, but for small setups, it is more than adequate, and you don't have CPU and number of VM limitations (that you get with the free ESXi version), and the paravirtualized driver support in Windows guests can make a considerable difference in performance (ie, it helps performance if all/most of your guest VMs will be running Windows or have synthetic drivers).

You can also download the free Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Core Edition (ie, Windows Server w/o GUI w/Hyper-V).

To achieve near native performance, you should pre-allocate virtual hard disk, but it helps to also have the option to use dynamically growing disks (for disks storing files that seldom change).

As for which version to get (2008 R2 vs 2012), it is up to you. It might take some getting used to the "Modern UI" in WSrv12, but there are considerable improvements in Hyper-V 3.0, making it worth it (and you don't have to deal with the Modern UI that much once you have Hyper-V installed).

As for the network card, for a small server, I typically get a VMQ (VMDq)/SRV-IO Intel capable dual port card and set them up in a Team (using Intel's enhanced drivers) - see http://www.intel.com/support/network/sb/CS-030993.htm

Hi

Maybe look here where dreamslacker writes: "Under Advanced system settings, you can disable NAT.  That will turn the box into a pure non-gateway router."

http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=30839.0

Then configure routing on the box and dont use any NAT in ether workstation or the pfsense box.

One more reply to my self here…

I had to give up, at the moment on installing 2.03 as KVM on omnios. I choosed to install 1.2.3 instead, and that went fine, no problems what so ever, worked fine with internal virtual switches, and everything looks good. Question is, can I upgrade to the latest? Wouldn't actually think that...

Rgrds Johan

while that is a good idea and the plan for the school is to eventually virtualize everything with ESXi, I'm more interested to solve the issue with the resources at hand - school's on a tight budget and can't afford IT guys to spend half a day to set up ESXi after virtualizing their stuff…

I guess I'll try with an Intel NIC first, see if it works.

Your vswitch in ESXi must be set to promiscuous mode for a spoofed MAC to work. Without that set, only the MAC assigned to that NIC of the VM by the hypervisor will be allowed to work by the vswitch.

Hi All,

I installed a vm using the pfSense 2.0.3-Release i386 for testing.
I tried to change the vm.kmem_size to 1GB and vm.kmem_size_max to 2GB but after that the pfSense cannot boot and I got this error:
KDB: debugger backends: ddb
KDB: current backend: ddb
1048576K of memory above 4GB ignored
panic: kmem_suballoc: bad status return of 3
cpuid = 0
KDB: enter: panic