OK, that is good to know. I seem to recall reading that performance (or something) was better with vmx. However I will switch if that's what it takes for reliability.

I think some questions are funny and some answers are funny and that not every post that lands here is as serious as you might like. But you are entitled to your feelings, so have at it.  Come on - Disabling both IPV4 and 6?  Its a little funny…. Not every reply to every mistake I ever made was serious either and I managed not to lose my cool. That said, I just joked because you already answered the issue.

I have come accross the same thing. The problem i have is when pinging the 2 carp boxes ping is fine.  When i ping the virtual ip address i get ping drops.] I'm struggling with vmware and pfsense. Mat

Is there anyone who has got this working?

Any resolve on this? I got the same issue

Hello, Did you had success install on Softlayer/Bluemix env? best regards, Carlos

Derelict your Xen NIC step seems to have fixed the issue. It looks like it is working perfectly now, thank you. Thank you as well KOM for you assistance.

If your hypervisor crashes, that is 100% a problem with your hypervisor or hardware. A problem in the guest OS should never cause the hypervisor to crash.

Thanks very much for the reply.  I did that and it's working fine.  Very happy with how this is running as a VM.  Much better than when I tried the x86 version on 2008R2 with its legacy adapters and all. Seamless install and config restored from my old 32bit box and everything works great.

What type of throughput did you see on this setup? I'm looking at doing something similar.

You are suggesting to migrate to another virtualization platform just in order to get some disk space? There must be an easier solution, right? Edit: Of course there is. Removed the disk in KVM guest, removed the underlying lvm logical volume and started over from scratch. Works now very well. Used this howto: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/disks-adding.html

Hi. In a past I'm using Xen as hypervisor too. But Proxmox VE (kvm hypervisor) more and more better. P.s. Even Amazon migrate to KVM.

@jimp: There is no limit I know of BUT ESX does wonky things with the NICs after 4. They get interleaved in the probe order. So you end up with: 1 5 2 3 4 or 1 5 2 6 3 7 4 8 So you have to be careful to line up the detected NICs, MAC addresses, interface assignments in pfSense and so on. According to https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=198406#c9 this can be fixed by editing ethernetX.pciSlotNumber lines respectively the vmx file directly on the ESXi.host. Up to 8 vmxnet3 interfaces they should look like: ethernet0.pciSlotNumber = "160" ethernet1.pciSlotNumber = "1184" ethernet2.pciSlotNumber = "192" ethernet3.pciSlotNumber = "1216" ethernet4.pciSlotNumber = "224" ethernet5.pciSlotNumber = "1248" ethernet6.pciSlotNumber = "256" ethernet7.pciSlotNumber = "1280"

Yep I can do that.. plenty of spare.

You could use hardware passthrough for the WAN interface to the pfSense VM instance. Slightly more complicated to configure but that way the interface isn't even visible in ESXI networking, so less risk for administrative mistakes.