This has been an extremely frustrating couple of hours and I'm no closer to solving it.

I have a pfSense VM running under unraid, which has a dual Intel NIC passed through to it.
Been working great for about 3 years +.
I perform regular updates on unraid, and currently on 7.2.3.

It ALWAYS comes back up after a reboot or any other changes, so I've never had an issue.

Today I was t-shooting some VPN slowness and figured I'd pin my VM (which has 4 CPU cores given to it) to the P cores on my Intel in case that made a difference.

^^ This CPU change was the ONLY change I made ^^

FIRST ISSUE:

• The VM couldn't find the boot image/device.

• Some how a setting seemed to have been changed that meant the primary vDiskbus was changed from SATA to VirtIO

Once I changed this back to SATA - it all worked.


SECOND ISSUE < I cannot fix currently.

• The VM seems unable to find the Intel NICs which are passed through to it.

• Tools > System Devices show the 2 x Intel Ethernet controllers in IOMMU groups 10 & 11

• These are still ticked / selected

• Have a green circle next to them.

• pfSense VM > Edit - I can see the 2 NICs under "Other PCI devices" and they are selected.

• Looking at the XML of the VM config with help of google/gemini, it seems they need some XML config added so that they are:

  • On the same bus (bus-='0x04')

  • The first entry requires this at the end of the line: multifunction='on'

  • The 2nd entry requires the same bus, but function changed from 0x0 to 0x1.

^^ None of this is working for me.

The VM now boots up, and I can see it's got all the VLAN config, but neither of those 2 NICs are showing up.

I've rebooted the Unraid server and still no change.

I'm really hoping that someone can help me here as I'm lost on how to get this working.

OMG.. I just fixed this...

Seems that the TYPE of network card passed to pfsense was also changed from e1000 to virtio-net..

Again, I didn't make this change so no idea why it auto-updated itself.

Glad you found it. For anyone else hitting this: the reason Unraid changed the NIC model is that the VM editor resets certain fields to their defaults when you modify other settings like CPU pinning. The current default NIC model in Unraid 7.x is virtio-net, which replaces the older e1000 default.

When pfSense boots with a virtio-net NIC instead of e1000, it sees an entirely different network device (vtnet0 instead of em0/igb0). Since pfSense's interface assignments are tied to the device name, it loses all its WAN/LAN configuration because the expected device no longer exists.

To prevent this in the future: after making any VM edit in the Unraid GUI, always check the XML tab before saving. Look for the <interface> section and verify the model type is still what you expect:

<model type='e1000'/>

If the GUI changed it to virtio-net and you want to keep e1000 for compatibility, switch to the XML view, fix it, and save from there. Alternatively, you can switch pfSense to use virtio-net permanently since it has better performance than e1000, but you will need to reassign your interfaces in pfSense (Interfaces > Interface Assignments) to map vtnet0/vtnet1 to WAN/LAN.