Migrate old pfSense appliance with em0 (E1000e) NICs to new appliance with VMXNET3 NIC's

Enso_

Hello,

As the title suggests, are there any gotchas when restoring the configuration of an outdated pfSense appliance into a new one if the network adapters have changed from E1000e (current) to VMXNET3 (new)?
My concern is that the old appliance is configured with E1000e NICs, whereas the new one will use VMXNET3 NICs.

My plan is to back up the configuration file from the current appliance, edit it to change the interface names from em0 to vmx0, leave all other settings unchanged, save the file, and then restore it to the new appliance.

Thanks!

SteveITS

@Enso_ In the simple case, no.

Yes you can edit the config file. Just be sure not to do a search and replace in case the NIC strings are used in an encoded string.

If you're not using complicated VLANs you should be able to just restore in the web GUI and it will ask you to assign the interfaces. Save, then apply to reboot. (note if it doesn't work it will stop on boot to ask at the console to reassign interfaces)

Enso_

@SteveITS

I tried what you suggested, but I ran into a few more issues after restoring the configuration file.

All configurations seem to have been restored without any problems. However, the only thing not working is OpenVPN. There are about eight OpenVPN connections configured. It’s easy enough to reassign all the interfaces, but after doing so, all the OpenVPN services show: “Unable to connect to daemon.”

Additionally, I tried rebooting to see if that would fix the issue. After rebooting, I need to reassign the WAN/LAN interfaces again, and doing so clears the OPT (OpenVPN) interface assignments. Just to clarify, when I reboot, both the WAN and LAN are displayed correctly in the console with the correct IPs, but the links appear to be down. Going through the WAN/LAN reassignment process brings the links back up but on the turn side, removes all other OPT assignments.

EDIT
One more thing, after restoring the config, I can only log in via the LAN IP. Whereas before I could login via the WAN IP provided I was already connecting from the LAN Subnet.

SteveITS

@Enso_ said in Migrate old pfSense appliance with em0 (E1000e) NICs to new appliance with VMXNET3 NIC's:

After rebooting, I need to reassign the WAN/LAN interfaces again

If it stops at the console and asks to reassign, that means pfSense is seeing an interface change (new or missing).

We have one client with OpenVPN but they don't have that assigned as an interface, so not sure I can help you there.

stephenw10

If it stops at the interfaces assign prompt during boot it should say which interface in the config doesn't exist on the firewall at that point. That should give you a clue.

You would normally be able access the firewall webgui on any IP address on the firewall from the LAN side because the default LAN firewall rules pass that. But you can could easily have added rules to not allow that.