Define problem please. Error? Specific issue? Computer slapping your hand when trying to boot it? pfSense is actually easy to put in ESXi. Make sure the 2 cards are recognized in ESXi (Configuration-Networking, Configuration-Network Adapters). Add each as an E1000 type ethernet card. One card connected to the Internet, the other to your local LAN switch. Once installed and connected, install the Open-VM-Tools package.

wow - i post this and like magic it starts working :) haha love it! Thanks for the magic fix forum!

Where is the source for /usr/sbin/gnid? Can't seem to find much about it.

Thanks!

You could try PXE booting mfsbsd and then fetch pfSense. Maybe I'll try and set it up out of curiosity…

Actually you can PXEboot mfsbsd. Once booted, you can fetch pfSense over the network and try and install it.

That's what I thought… Well, I guess it also depends on the packages installed. I was running Squid, but am quite sure I had offloaded the writes to a traditional HD that was also installed in the same server. All logs were going to a syslog server on the network. That's why I was puzzled when the firewall started failing recently. The Nanobsd install has been running flawlessly for a week now so it definitely was an HD problem. Also, that SuperMicro SATA-DOM I'm using is only 16GB, so I have less room for errors, and that's why I want to make sure I don't lessen IT'S life. When it fails, I'm going back to a quality SSD drive and will simply use the RAM disk just to be safe. Thanks all. Good to know for the future.

thanks  ::)

So you restored a config from when you had packages installed? Squid can behave oddly when installed and not configured on occasion. Check the system log to see if it's continually restarting. Steve

PfSense doesn't have man(1) and the related utilities but the packages still want to run the indexing tools on install. It's a bit broken but we have to do with what the FreeBSD ports offers.

At least I am not alone in the world. Another nanoBSD with the same "stuck on p16": https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=129994.msg716584#msg716584

I ended up just re-installing 2.3.3-p1 on it and will test more tonight. Thank you for the suggestion.

Reinstalling the package seems to have fixed it.

https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Boot_Troubleshooting#Booting_from_USB

If you see two drives, the system must contain an mSATA SSD along with the default eMMC drive. Did you add an mSATA disk yourself? Normally when we ship a system with mSATA, the eMMC remains blank. You only need to worry about upgrading the version on the disk that firewall boots and runs from. The other disk wouldn't be used.

Yes, now is a good time to learn how to connect something to the console.

I'd just like to thank you guys for your input. I've managed to get it working near perfect and I've been learning the ins and outs. I have a small issue with putting it behind a Server 2012 with Active Directory as the DNS doesn't want to play nice. I made a root hints only and that wasn't working so I just made a forward only zone and I'm able to see it but can't connect a client PC at the moment. I'll keep chugging away. Thank you again, I truly appreciate it.

Gravedigging this to note that it seems that PFSense 2.4 will be the release that is based on FreeBSD11, meaning it should finally be able to install to/boot from NVMe storage at that point.

I did a restore of the config.xml on the new VM not on the old. I backuped the config.xml via scp and did a full install and restored. It's the new VM that failed. It was the config.xml itself that was problematic. Something got wrong at the upgrade.