PfSense with xenserver
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Hello all,
After running pfsense on a dedicated machine for a while, I decided to move everything to my xenserver. After figuring out the configuration and everything for the networking I started to benchmark my final production. The pfSense (2.0) has 3 virtual nics assigned to it via the xenserver.
re0 - WAN
re1 - LAN
re2 - OPT1WAN is a physical port that goes direct to the internet
LAN is a physical port that allows a switch to be connected to it
OPT1 is a virtual network for all my virtual VMsI have 1 problem however. All of my pfsense nics are given the speed 10/100 with 100 auto negotiate. I need this to be 1g/s speeds and know the physical hardware on the machine is supported and am pretty sure that the virtual xenserver is also supported for 1g/s.
a few of my VMs are getting 100m/s and my windows vm is getting 2g/s (xenserver virtualizes 2gig/s nics). my speeds from the windows machine on the OPT1 (virtual) vs my LAN (physical) is completely different because of the bottleneck of 100mb/s on the LAN port.
is there anyway to verify exactly what my problem is, I was thinking it was an auto negotiate problem, but during a brand new install on a new VM with the same nics assigned to it the boot process shows 10/100 max. if anyone else has gotten pfsense to work on xenserver or knows what my issue is that would be great. I have already spent countless hours trying to track down the bottleneck and my virtual NAS is very bottlenecked between the LAN and the OPT1 ports.
Thanks,
Jon
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Hi spiegeljb,
Are you using opensource XEN or Citrix XEN server? If opensource you can add the option in the vif with 'model=e1000' to have hvm gigalan. I never used Citrix server so I don't know how to do it there. You will have to reassign the nics in pfsense again during bootup since it will detect it as new nics. Unless your hardware can support HVM pci pass thru it will be in bridge mode.
Hope this helps.
Eric -
Im running citrix xenserver and I have no problem getting gigabit with other machines. Im not sure if there is a different setup for network that I should be using but regardless of my links the drivers themselves (which is why I put it in the hardware section) are showing 10/100.
Any help would be great.
Thanks
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Hi spiegeljb,
I think you may need to ask around in the citrix forums. If your hardware can support IOMMU either in AMD forgot what the name of it is or Intel VT-d, you can directly pass pci to the HVM. Then the HVM will install the proper drivers rather than using pv-drivers or emulated IO drivers. Remember if you don't have IOMMU in your BIOS you will not be able to do pci pass thru to HVM. Below is an example of my pfsense config file :-
import os, re
arch = os.uname()[4]kernel = "/usr/lib64/xen-4.0/boot/hvmloader"
builder='hvm'memory = 1024
shadow_memory = 8
name = "pfsense"
vif = [ 'type=ioemu, mac=00:16:3e:xx:xx:xx, bridge=eth0, model=e1000',
'type=ioemu, mac=00:16:3e:xx:xx:xx, bridge=eth1, model=e1000',
'type=ioemu, mac=00:16:3e:xx:xx:xx, bridge=dummy0, model=e1000',
]disk = [ 'phy:/dev/vgvolume/pfsense,xvda,w' ]
, 'file:/home/pfSense-1.2.3-RELEASE-LiveCD-Installer.iso,xvdc:cdrom,r' ]
device_model = '/usr/lib64/xen-4.0/bin/qemu-dm'
boot on floppy (a), hard disk
or CD-ROM (d)default: hard disk, cd-rom, floppy
boot="dc"
vcpus=2
cpus=["1", "2"]
pae=0
acpi=1
apic=1
sdl=0
vnc=1
vnclisten="0.0.0.0"
vncconsole=1
vncpasswd=''
stdvga=0
serial='pty'
usb=1
usbdevice='mouse'on_poweroff = 'destroy'
on_reboot = 'restart'
on_crash = 'restart'Hope this helps
Eric