Hyper-V - PFsense 2.0.1 - Some tips.

jceb3167

I don't think that Pfsense is ready to work well on HyperV since this hypervisor does not support FreeBSD 8.1.
It may work but I doubt it will be suitable for production equipment.
I would recommend to use ESXi instead.

http://www.opttic.com

cicero44bc

I agree, for a test environment though its been fine for me. I have not used it beyond basic routing however.

janneb

I have successfully used your tips to install pfsense on hyper-v 2.0 (Win8 / Srv2012) today and will use it as my primary home firewall. Very convenient to run my firewall on my workstation (Hyper-V is built in win8). I will let you know what I find out. One obvious limitation is that the legacy adapters are 100mbit :'(

janneb

SOpenness 6 Aug 2012 9:46 AM
Thank you for your interest in the FreeBSD support for Hyper-V! Check back on the blog later this week, when we’ll have more details on the release and where to get the code

http://blogs.technet.com/b/openness/archive/2012/05/10/freebsd-support-on-windows-server-hyper-v.aspx

C'mon c'mon c'mon ..

cicero44bc

Thanks Janneb. Fortunately the drivers are already released (I foolishly hadn't thought to check until you posted this!) http://blogs.technet.com/b/openness/archive/2012/08/09/available-today-freebsd-support-for-windows-server-hyper-v.aspx which links to building the kernel with the new drivers here - https://github.com/FreeBSDonHyper-V/freebsd/wiki/Build-the-kernel-with-the-HyperV-drivers I'm yet to try it but it sounds exciting.

ericsche

Hello,

drivers are for FreeBSD 8.2 and beyond so we need to use PFSense 2.1

I've been trying for a few days with no luck :(
Any idea how to patch the kernel ?

jimp

Even if you manage to get it to work, they still have a lot of work to do before it would be useful on a firewall.

See http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2012-August/069148.html

cicero44bc

Thanks for the heads up jimp.

iskull

I'm trying to use pfSense w/ Hyper-v on Windows 2008 R2, but I'm not getting :-\

My pfsense version:

[2.0.1-RELEASE][admin@maybach.prosperi.local]/root(30): uname -a
FreeBSD maybach.prosperi.local 8.1-RELEASE-p6 FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE-p6 #0: Mon Dec 12 18:15:35 EST 2011     root@FreeBSD_8.0_pfSense_2.0-AMD64.snaps.pfsense.org:/usr/obj./usr/pfSensesrc/src/sys/pfSense_SMP.8  amd64

I'm getting this messagens in dmesg:

calcru: runtime went backwards from 5 usec to 2 usec for pid 17 (vmdaemon)
calcru: runtime went backwards from 166 usec to 92 usec for pid 16 (pagedaemon)
calcru: runtime went backwards from 435 usec to 247 usec for pid 9 (pfpurge)
calcru: runtime went backwards from 36 usec to 19 usec for pid 8 (sctp_iterator)
calcru: runtime went backwards from 7720 usec to 4033 usec for pid 7 (fdc0)
calcru: runtime went backwards from 8496 usec to 4631 usec for pid 14 (yarrow)
calcru: runtime went backwards from 1121396 usec to 603195 usec for pid 4 (g_down)
calcru: runtime went backwards from 818454 usec to 429006 usec for pid 3 (g_up)

And searching on the web I found this:

http://xtravirt.com/disabling-virtual-machine-guest-host-time-synchronization-multiple-hypervisors
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/troubleshoot.html#calcru-negative-runtime
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/troubleshoot.html#COMPUTER-CLOCK-SKEW

I tried all solutions above, but no success yet :( any suggestions?

tester_02

@iskull:

I tried all solutions above, but no success yet :( any suggestions?

Move on for now. I've moved on to vmware until hyper-v on freebsd gets sorted out. I'd love to come back and run hyper-v as I would not have to install other software on the windows machines I am running it on.
Oracle solution seems good too.

iskull

@tester_02:

@iskull:

I tried all solutions above, but no success yet :( any suggestions?

Move on for now. I've moved on to vmware until hyper-v on freebsd gets sorted out. I'd love to come back and run hyper-v as I would not have to install other software on the windows machines I am running it on.
Oracle solution seems good too.

:(

If somebody runs pfsense with successful on Hyper-V - Windows 2008 r2, please, share with us :D

kobedexter

Hi I'm new in PFsense, but i found this blog in google

http://www.zomers.eu/knowledge/pfSense/Pages/Install-pfSense-on-Windows-2008-Hyper-V-server.aspx

with this guide I have instaled the PFsense in the hyper-v, but I have a Problem, when y restart PFsense these loss conection to internet.

msi

Just as JimP said: The support for FreeBSD inside Hyper-V is still far from complete.

My general (and painful experience) with Linux was: It took MS ages to support it correctly, now it's ok.
Everything that MS does not support with integration drivers is slow or even crashy, I wouldn't even remotely consider pfSense for any production use on Hyper-V yet. Sorry to say :-/

tester_02

Anyone try pfsense under 2012 hyper-v? I am just starting to test 2012, so I plan to give it a shot.

peterclark4

They seem to run pretty much the same, I have migrated a few from 2008 to 2012.

tester_02

booo. Guess it's wait for freebsd 10 or 11. Hopefully by then we can have better support :)

thesystem

I'm installing pfSense 2.1 Beta0 on Hyper-V 2008R2. The live cd worked for as far as I tested (with legacy nics), however a install to disk failed with the error:
Execution of the command
/sbin/fdisk -v -f /tmp/format.fdisk ad0
FAILED with a return code of 1

This was because I used a Dynamically Expanding disk. After changing it to a Fixed Size disk, the install continued.

As mentioned before, the nics don't receive data after first boot. To fix this I did the following:
Go to the shell
vi /usr/local/etc/rc.d/interfaces.sh

Press INSERT and start typing the following (watch out for typos as these are difficult to correct in VI):

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

When done, press INSERT and type:

:wq

Followed by pressing ENTER

Type:

chmod +x /usr/local/etc/rc.d/interfaces.sh

Followed by pressing ENTER. This will allow the script to run.

This makes pfSense work in Hyper-V.

I'm also looking at loadbalancing multiple nics to see if I can increase the throughput. Anybody got experience with this?

elementalwindx

Has this issue of the legacy adapters not being gigabit been solved?

Seriously thinking of doing this with my server.

Wish it was stable for production as I have several R710 servers with multiple nics that would be nice to combine into windows/pfsense box.

msi

Nope, with 2012 R2 there will be an additional new hardware model using UEFI (+ SecureBoot) and even no
more legacy hardware so pfSense will only boot on the same hardware model as Linux VMs did.

The legacy NIC has just been there for compatibility but I'v not seen MS being interested in improving this.
It's been slow crap (but it worked even in early days), but that's about it.

You'd have to go with KVM or VMware instead as they both do either good e1000 emulation or bring their FreeBSD compatible paravirt NIC.

zootie

I didn't see anybody mention the "Hyper-V integration installed with pfSense 2.0.1" thread, so I'm posting on this thread for the benefit of anybody watching it. In essence, we've been doing custom pfSense 2.0.x and 2.1 ISO builds with Chris Knight's Hyper-V patches (plus a couple fixes). YMMV depending on your environment, but it is working great for several (many?) Hyper-V users.

I just did a new build with the Hyper-V aware kernel and pfSense 2.1 Release. See http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,56565.msg362435.html#msg362435 and following posts (check out the complete thread for troubleshooting tips and issues others have found).