As the title reads, I am interested in virtualizing my pfSense instance to consolidate. Anyone done this yet?

Yes, I have accomplished setting up a VM with pfSense on both XEN in the early betas and now with KVM in the later betas. I haven't replaced my current pfSense box yet though. I am waiting until unRAID 6 is final or (if final takes a while) when unRAID goes to  RC. So yes I did get one setup but I haven't really played much with it so I cannot say how stable it is.

I sure have, I elected to move over to Sophos UTM 9 - Home over pfSense now. But that is irrelevant, basically it still needs to be a HVM, whatever flavor you decide to put on that HVM will be the same config and process. I actually have the pfSense HVM sitting there shut down, i might switch back one day but its Sophos for now.

 

Here is my Xen config for my HVM if you're having dramas, it took me a while to figure out.

 

name='sop-host'

builder="hvm"

vcpus=2

memory=2048

disk = ['file:/mnt/VM-hosts/sop-host/sop-host.img,hda,w',

'file:/mnt/VM-hosts/iso/latest_asg_v9_software.iso,hdc:cdrom,r']

vif = [ 'mac=00:16:3e:01:01:00,bridge=br0,model=e1000']

 

# boot=[c|d|n] # Selects the emulated virtual device to boot from. Options are hard disk ©, cd-rom (d) or network/PXE (n).

# Multiple options can be given and will be attempted in the order they are given. e.g. to boot from cd-rom  but fallback to the hard disk you can give dc. The default is cd.

 

boot="cd"

 

acpi = '1'

apic = '1'

viridian = '1'

xen_platform_pci='1'

sdl = '0'

vnc = '1'

vncconsole= '1'

vnclisten = '0.0.0.0'

#vncpasswd = ' '

usb = '1'

usbdevice = 'tablet'

serial = 'pty'

on_poweroff="destroy"

on_reboot="restart"

on_crash="destroy"

# PCI Passthrough Intel Network Controller.

pci = [ '04:00.0' ]

 

Remember a HVM host will not output console to the screen you need to connect to it VIA VNC on your unraid IP address to perform the build.

Also if you're going to present a second interface you need to pass that through before spinning up the HVM so it can see it.

 

I also run all my VM's outside of my array from a stand alone SSD, as unraid needs the array started before you can spin up your VM's this can be problematic if your VMs are on your array, also would require you array to be spun up all the time, so basically don't do it.

 

So in the go script i advertise my PCI passthrough and mount my VM drive (not my cache drive this is separate)

 

#Mount SSD as VM-hosts

mkdir /mnt/VM-hosts

mount -rw -o noatime,nodiratime,discard -t ext4 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-Samsung_SSD_840_Series_S19MNSAD611108Y-part1 /mnt/VM-hosts

#Assign PCI Passthrough

xl pci-assignable-add 04:00.0