[Solved] - VMware 6.0-U2 - Pfsense Appliance v2.3.1 + Tools & Balloon Driver?

cheesyboofs

Guys,

I have pfsense running as a VM and quite happy I am too!

However vSphere keeps moaning about excessive paging even though the VM has 1Gb of RAM and is only using 19% of that. Furthermore it's not even touching the 2Gb Swap partition.
Reading about I have seen suggestions that this is because the "this can occur if the VMware tools have not been installed in a VM or if the vmmemctl (balloon) memory driver has been disabled,"

I have installed the VMware tools package (version:2147483647 - Guest Managed) from the package menu and all seems fine but if I run the command "kldstat" (as some have suggested) it doesn't seem to show any of the modules are running?

Id Refs Address            Size     Name
 1    1 0xffffffff80200000 225ed50  kernel

Could this be the problem?

So in summary:

What version of PFsense should I be running on vSphere 6.0U2 and what should the Hardware version of the VM be set to? (currently version 8 )
How can I confirm the balloon driver within the tools is functioning correctly?

Thanks Gents.

Guest

Try disabling ballooning or dynamic RAM sizing for the VM.

cheesyboofs

Apparently the way to do that is to set the reservation to maximum.

https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/02/disable-ballooning.html

Disabling the balloon-driver will likely worsen the performance of the virtual machine and drives the problem down the stack. If you want to disable memory reclamation for that virtual machine, apply reservations.

I tried this but the VM is still swapping, (after a reboot),

But looking at the above image it looks like I actually need to apply more RAM to the VM even though the pfsense web interface suggests that it not even being touched,

There seems to be a disconnect in what VMware shows and what the pfSense web interface shows?
Any input welcome but I am reluctant to just keep adding RAM if it is going to be gobbled up and not used …

Cheers

cheesyboofs

I think this is now solved - I only ever reboot my firewall when I upgrade the OS ( because it is so stable :P )
It seems to get the tools to function correctly you have to reinstall them under the package menu and then reboot the firewall one more time.

Guest

It does help to reboot once the new tools are there indeed :p Then VMW and BSD both know about their capabilities and it actually works ;-)