2.6 to 2.7 on ESXi 5.50

[heliop100]

Hi.
I update one 2.6 to 2.7 VM on ESXi 5.5 (ML350 G5 HP)
After the successful update, the system boots, but after the interfaces gets UP the VM turns off.

What may be the problem?

Thanks.

[bmeeks]

The newer releases of FreeBSD use a vmxnet3 driver that is incompatible with ESXi 5.5 and earlier. Ran into that in my own FreeBSD server virtual machines. As soon as the network driver was activated the VM crashed hard. Because pfSense is based off FreeBSD, it will be impacted by the driver issue.

Biting the bullet and upgrading the ESXi to 6.0 and eventually 6.7 solved the problem. I can't go higher than 6.7 because my ancient RAID controller is not supported any longer in ESXi versions 7.x and up.

Another interim solution, although you will lose performance, is to change the NIC driver to e1000 in the affected virtual machines. That's what I did for the short term until I was able to update the ESXi host to 6.7u3.

[heliop100]

Thanks a lot bmeeks.