I am also looking into something similar in order to make my rack at home more green.

You'll need a managed switch and a dedicated NIC in the host box.  VLAN your WAN to the dedicated NIC.

And yeah, security could be an issue.  Do ur homework :)

problem solved

on the wan sides in windows windows services was on

now it works normaly

only the the virtual machine does not start automatically when i reboot pc it stops in workstaion 7

I'm not sure I understand the question.
I've never run pfSense as a VM so I can't comment there but in a full install your wireless interface will be recognised automatically (as long as it's a supported device) and the wireless options will appear in the interfaces section of the gui.
If, however, you are using an external access point connected to via ethernet then why do you want to tell pfSense that it's wifi on the end? What do you hope to gain by doing so?
I would say that a WISP is a very appropriate use of pfSense.  :)
Steve

Catfish,
Here is what I do when running PFSENSE in VM Mode.
I use a dedicated NIC for the WAN and for LAN.  With that in mind. THESE ARE DEDIDICATED ADAPTERS.  I am using a managed switch, I use port 1 and port 2 form the connection from the DSL switch and that is in VLAN 1.  In VLAN 2 I connec the rest of my computers.

You can assign additional adapters up to 16 in 5.6 FP1.  That gives you alot of options.  Depending on the type of switches you have access to you can do alot really cool stuff with it.
RC

so I bought the pfSense book and it has one paragraph about how ACPI can only cause trouble with pfSense and it told how to disable it.

So I did…just for the heck of it.

Excellent! Changing the NICs in the VM to e1000 made all the difference.

I had considered this before but I couldn't change the existing NIC. Not knowing ESXi very well it took me a while to realize I had to add a new NIC in order to have the choice.

I've attached a new screenshot of the graphs during testing to compare for the curious.

Oh, and I'm not sure about the kernel not being SMP. In my system logs it says the following:

kernel: sullrich@FreeBSD_7.2_pfSense_1.2.3_snaps.pfsense.org:/usr/obj.pfSense/usr/pfSensesrc/src/sys/pfSense_SMP.7

pfsenseLowCPU.PNG
pfsenseLowCPU.PNG_thumb

Yes. If you put everything behind a virtual firewall the only MAC they see is the firewall's.

You could still use VirtualBox for that, though why would you want to? There isn't much benefit to running nanobsd inside of a VM.

It doesn't output to VGA, so there is no console output beyond where you saw it "hang"

You can setup a virtual serial port in VirtualBox using a named pipe, and then connect to that pipe with PuTTY. I do that with my development NanoBSD VMs in VMware.

Couldn't you create yourself a backdoor? Like a private VPN just in case you do and make sure you make the rule to access the vpn one of the first rules. Or modify the kernel of the xen server to give you a backdoor on boot similar to this article. http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/579

It must vary from config to config because when I run pfSense under Hyper-V, I do see a bit of a performance hit, but not like what others are reporting.  I also have never had to do any of the interface down/up hacks that some seem to need.

I guess it's very much ymmv.  :-)

@Kharcoff:

Quick update to others, I've played with the same Hyper-V machine, and the only thing that it was not working is the automatic start of the interfaces (both Wan and Lan). So everytime I boot pfSense I have to go to option 8 Shell and run the down and up on both interfaces:

ifconfig de0 down
ifconfig de0 up
ifconfig de1 down
ifconfig de1 up

Is easier to do this:

http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,30760.msg163707.html#msg163707

You probably don't need the dhclient de0 line, but I do as my cable modem give my public IP to the WAN interface via DHCP

@Supermule:

Its the difficult way to do it….Just DL the ISO file and install normally via VM console....

that is what I did…easy as 123.

1. create VM on ESX
2. create 2 virtual switches on ESX, one for pfsense WAN, one for pfsense LAN
3.  assign one physical nic to each switch created  in step 2.
4.  copy pfsense iso image to ESX datastore
5.  configure VM created in step 1 to boot from this iso image
6.  power on VM and follow prompts to load and configure pfsense.
7.  assign nics during pfsense install as appropriate
8. set up pfsense for your network topology

that is it in a nutshell

Concidering virtual network cards and virtual switches, this will be no problem, however, why not run both services on the same installation ?

Hi nitro

This is a post I wrote on my blog. This is one working solution.

http://blog.magiksys.net/node/1

Regards.

Alain