Installing in a Parallels VM
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Has anyone here ever installed pfSense in a Parallels VM?
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pfSense is an entire FreeBSD operating system (essentially, that is, under the hood) with a PHP GUI on top for management. It's not a Windows application. You can't load pfSense onto another OS. You can run it as a virtual machine in VMware ESXi, VMware Workstation, Proxmox and KVM to name a few.
So far as I understand it (having never used it myself), Parallels is strictly an application that allows you to run Microsoft Windows on a Mac. You can't run pfSense on Windows because pfSense is not an application. It is an entire OS. So I think the answer to your original question is "no".
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@bmeeks: Parallels is an environment to run virtual machines, just like VMWare. The main difference is that Parallels is specifically developed for macOS as the host OS.
That said, Parallels in principle allows for the installation of FreeBSD on (what’s the proper preposition, “on” or “in?”) a virtual machine. My question was more specifically about how to go about doing that with pfSense’s installation .img files. I haven’t found a way to boot off the USB installer I made from the one for 2.5.0. I also tried using the .iso for installation from a virtual CD, which failed with some error during the boot sequence.
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@bmeeks said in Installing in a Parallels VM:
pfSense is an entire FreeBSD operating system (essentially, that is, under the hood) with a PHP GUI on top for management. It's not a Windows application. You can't load pfSense onto another OS. You can run it as a virtual machine in VMware ESXi, VMware Workstation, Proxmox and KVM to name a few.
With your driving home this point I did a search for how to install FreeBSD into a Parallels VM in general. I came across a tutorial for doing so, in which I merely replaced the FreeBSD installation DVD .iso with the pfSense memstick installer image I had download from Netgate. pfSense is installing now.
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Learned something new! I'm not a Mac user (other than an iPhone), so I've never used Parallels. I had always only heard it used in the context of running Windows on Mac, and a very cursory Google search seemed to show only hits for Windows, but obviously my search was too cursory.
Looks like it is good to go for you.
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@bmeeks: My main reason for trying this was to see, whether I could learn something about what I would have to do to get the same image to install on my Protectli FW2. I have another post on this forum from yesterday.
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@dominikhoffmann said in Installing in a Parallels VM:
@bmeeks: My main reason for trying this was to see, whether I could learn something about what I would have to do to get the same image to install on my Protectli FW2. I have another post on this forum from yesterday.
FreeBSD can be picky about hardware support sometimes. It is not as forgiving in that area as the Linux distros. It tends to lag behind supporting some of the more modern hardware.
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I’ve spun up a few VMware Fusion VMs when testing stuff, but never used them in production.
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@nogbadthebad: I have thought about under what circumstances a VM instance of pfSense would make sense. The host hardware would have to have the extra Ethernet ports, at least. With macOS that’s not very feasible, which nixes Parallels. Maybe an old Mac Pro would do…, but it wouldn’t run the latest host OS.
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@dominikhoffmann Virtual NICs under VMware Fusion.
You could even have another virtual Mac sat the other side of a virtual pfSense install.