Vmware server 2.0 pfsense poor traffic shaping

stuck

Hi everyone,
I have been using pfsense at my office and home for serveral months now. I also run pbxinaflash behind it for my phone sevice. The main duty for the pfsense is the traffic shaper for the VOIP traffic which it does a great job at.

Last week I decided to try pfsense in VMware on my home machine to avoid having 2 machines at home.
Here is my hardware: Dell 4550 P4, 2.4ghz, 1.25gb ram, 3 NIC's (onboard Intel, Dlink 10/100, Dlink gigabit) all configured for bridge mode in VM.
so my PIAF on CentOS 5.2 is the host with VMware server 2.0 installed. I used the pfsense virtual appliance here: http://files.pfsense.org/vmware/pfSense-1.2.1-RC2-VM.zip with 256mb ram dedictated.
and configured the NAT/firewall, and traffic shaper as I have done before.
Everything works fine except the VOIP quality sounds only as good as a SOHO router without QOS
Is this a known problem with a setup similar to mine or did I screw up somewhere?

TIA

cmb

Traffic shaping can be difficult in VMware because in certain circumstances the timing inside the VM is very poor. Shaping is highly reliant on system time, which in any hypervisor can be extremely unreliable.

stuck

Thanks cmb,
I actually gave up on that idea for awhile, but it was bugging me all this time and so I finally came back to it again, because I noticed that my traffic shaper rules had some errors in it in that VM. So I re-setup the traffic shaper now without error messages, my voip quality (at least for my 1st day of testing) seem to be on par with a stand-alone machine. So time will tell…
I'll update over the next few days.

ideaman007

Any updates to your testing with the VM? I'm having some issues myself using pfsense under vmware 2.0 on ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS server.

xerxes

I have traffic shaping in my proxmox machine installed as KVM with 3 NICs. One for the other VE's while the other NIC as WAN port for my pfsense and the other as LAN port of pfsense.. So far so good. :)

stuck

@ideaman007:

Any updates to your testing with the VM? I'm having some issues myself using pfsense under vmware 2.0 on ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS server.

Sorry haven't posted in awhile…
I've been running several pbx servers each with pfsense inside vmware server 2.0 in CentOS 5.2 host, successfully. Under standard Business DSL 5M/768K, these servers handle 25+ computers & extensions, >6 simultaneous external voip calls, and multiple RDP sessions through the vm-pfsense beautifully. The clients have been very impressed with what they get from a C2D machine.