How much virtual storage for pfsense VM installation?
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I'm going to install several pfsense VM in a test environment. The main datastore is on a single SSD, so space is rather limited. How small of a virtual disk can I use for this pfsense in a ESXi host? Would 5gb be more than enough if I don't use any other installed packages or addons?
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I've done it with as little as 2GB in the past. Not recently.
My personal use pfsense is installed on a 64GB SSD and is using about 6GB after I don't know? 5 or 6 years use?
I might go with an even 8GB with the VMs just to make sure you don't ruin your tests with too low storage.
Since pfsense is currently being sold with storage options as low as 4GB, I'd imagine you can get by with that even with a few packages.
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Minimum system requirement is 1 GB for disk. You will need more depending on your selection of extra packages.
https://www.pfsense.org/hardware/#requirements
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I setup vm with 4gb disk, pfsense is currently using less than 1/3 of that
29% of 3.9GiB - ufs
Unless your storing lots of packages and something that caches like squid or something you don't really need a lot of disk space to route and firewall ;)
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The only reason I used a 64GB SSD is because I used to use squid cache.
If I built a new one today and had to buy all new parts I'd probably go with 8GB just for a bit of future proofing.But yeah - I had one running on a 2GB drive for about a year until I switched to a physical box.
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Thank you all! I'll allocate 5gb which should be plenty of headroom for just testing purposes.
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For most purposes, I usually do 5 GB.
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I have sized my pfsense instances with 10GB. One (that is running for multiple years now) is currently consuming only 1.7 GB.
But I would not care too much about it. Just make the disk thin-provisioned!
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I thin provision my test VMs and give them ~8GB of space. Never had an issue with that size, even with some swap space configured, but none of them have much package data either.
