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    Newb needs help installing pfSense in ESXi 4.1

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    • D
      danswartz
      last edited by

      The hang is normal.  I am running pfsense 2.0 under ESXi and it works fine.  It will hang for a minute or two trying to get a WAN IP and then will proceed.  Also, not trying to bust your chops here, but while I understand there is a learning curve for the ESXi interface, asking about it on the pfsense forum is not likely to be helpful.  I highly recommend one of the Scott Lowe books.  You're asking for trouble by deploying a less common VM (pfsense) while still learning the ESXi basics.  One thing I recommend once you are up: make sure you install the vmware tools for pfsense.  Also I do recommend the e1000 virtual NIC.

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      • M
        MarkJohnson
        last edited by

        Thanks for your reply.  I watched some ESX video tutorials and they were most helpful.  Unfortunately after finishing the lessons my whole ESXi went bonkers.  Even my working VMs stopped working properly.  After much troubleshooting and finally losing ESXi completely I was forced to reset ESXi configurations and after reinstalling pfsense from scratch all is working great. as is Untangle.

        Now to figure out how to get the two to work together.

        Thanks again
        -=Mark=-

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        • M
          MarkJohnson
          last edited by

          I had one minor issue upon installing pfSense 1.2.3 on ESXi.  It said there was a NIC mismatch and listed my NICs as em0 and em1.  Is this normal behavior in a virtual machine?  or is there a misconfiguration on my part?

          Picture of error:

          nicmismatch.jpg
          nicmismatch.jpg_thumb

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          • T
            thermo
            last edited by

            that's normal behaviour of pfsense, on first setup, it prompts you to setup the interfaces. In this case 'mismatch' means 'not configured'.

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            • M
              MarkJohnson
              last edited by

              That's what I assumed since it worked in the end.  Just strange I never received that mismatch message or the nic listings when installing pfsense on my spare pc about a dozen times trying to figure out the program.  Maybe ESXi environment freaked out pfsense and made it recheck for nics?

              Glad there was no major issues.

              Thanks
              -=Mark=-
              ps, I never did get auto-config to work and had to manually chose the nics.

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              • A
                abnz
                last edited by

                @thermo:

                that's normal behaviour of pfsense, on first setup, it prompts you to setup the interfaces. In this case 'mismatch' means 'not configured'.

                Hi I'm struggling with this too. I'm running pfsense vs 1.2.3 (latest I think) I have 3 ports on the host. One for management of the host and it has a couple of guests running.
                The other two ports are configured for the firewall WAN and LAN connected to a virtual switch for each port. So 3 nics 3 virtual switches.
                When I install pfsesne it all goes reasonably well only it doesn't seem to recognise the NICs. I get a mismatch, and it wont let me configure the nics.
                If I follow the wizard it just errors and says no interfaces present. It just isn't seeing them. I have tried configuring the two FW nics as E1000 and several other options, but same result, on one of the other options I think it saw the nics but still would not let me configure.
                Im OK on pfsense and have configured this version before no problems. Any clues?

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                • H
                  heper
                  last edited by

                  @abnz

                  Get pfsense 2.0 , its much better then 1.2.3, also make sure your network interfaces are set to E1000 in your VM settings.

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                  • M
                    MarkJohnson
                    last edited by

                    @abnz:

                    @thermo:

                    that's normal behaviour of pfsense, on first setup, it prompts you to setup the interfaces. In this case 'mismatch' means 'not configured'.

                    Hi I'm struggling with this too. I'm running pfsense vs 1.2.3 (latest I think) I have 3 ports on the host. One for management of the host and it has a couple of guests running.
                    The other two ports are configured for the firewall WAN and LAN connected to a virtual switch for each port. So 3 nics 3 virtual switches.
                    When I install pfsesne it all goes reasonably well only it doesn't seem to recognise the NICs. I get a mismatch, and it wont let me configure the nics.
                    If I follow the wizard it just errors and says no interfaces present. It just isn't seeing them. I have tried configuring the two FW nics as E1000 and several other options, but same result, on one of the other options I think it saw the nics but still would not let me configure.
                    Im OK on pfsense and have configured this version before no problems. Any clues?

                    I get this error every time I setup pfsense with ESXi.  I figured out it is an issue with my modem.  It locks itself to the PCs MAC address and ESXi changes it, so you have to unplug the modem and plug it in again for it to sync up with the virtual MAC address.

                    The easy way is to unplug all Ethernet cables on the PC and plug in the one setup asks for and it finds them quicker.  Otherwise it turns into a guessing game and whether or not the modem is synced up or you have the right port selected.

                    hopefully this does the trick for you.
                    -=Mark=-

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                    • P
                      pf123user
                      last edited by

                      Regarding ESXi install, VMware doesn't allow you to connect to a CD or DVD drive while the power is off and once you turn the power on it fails to find a boot device.

                      You can go to the configurations page and under the advanced settings set it to auto-reboot every 10seconds if it fails to boot the first time (at least you can do this in ESXi 5.0). Power the VM on and then connect the media device (USB, CD, DVD, etc.) and then wait the 10sec and it'll reboot, find the drive and you are good to go!

                      Hopefully this will help in the future if someone searches for this.

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                      • J
                        joako
                        last edited by

                        I did this just the other day and in my vSphere I do have an option "connected on power on"

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