Pfsense virtio performance. Currently, 8 is the maximum value for this setting.

Pfsense virtio performance. Aug 15, 2020 · Hi, I'm running pfsense, freenas and a few other linux vms under proxmox. 5? Because the NICs are all software, it makes no sense to hardware offloading, likely increase Oct 22, 2021 · Poor 10Gb performance, need help troubleshooting Started by rungekutta, October 22, 2021, 10:05:12 PM Previous topic - Next topic In commit:2ac109889ae1afeeea6cdd8dbcc339023a3f32a0 the virtio driver was added from upstream freebsd. Others are outlined in the FreeBSD main page Introduction This page is intended to be a collection of various performance tips/tweaks to help you get the most from your KVM virtual machines. I have created both network adapters in the VM with virtio, as recommended, and disabled the hardware checksum offload. In the past NIC performance could be an issue and there was a pretty hard recommendation to use passthrough NICs rather than VirtIO but that is not really a problem anymore. This configuration provides better performance compared to the default options. First I turned on multithreading for IPsec - it didn't help. Plus I thought the bitrate between CTs and pfSense through the virtual NIC (OPT1) will be MUCH higher. I went into the vm, saw the drivers were set to E1000 so I changed them to virtio. (I made sure to re-enable pf. Jun 4, 2012 · For those who run PFSense inside a KVM Virtual Machine, here are some easy steps to enable VirtIO for your PFSense VM. The reason simply openvswitch package updates. Nov 17, 2022 · With all of the above changes, I achieved my desired performance with OPNsense, running in a KVM virtual machine on Proxmox. Netgate is a pfSense in a box with add on features. Aside from NAT and firewall, I only use DHCP for certain subnets as well as OpenVPN. Wow, I didn't expect this much of a change. Aug 2, 2019 · Hi all! I recently had to reinstall opnsense due to a issue upgrading from development to production. Identical performance to physical pfsense hardware (before virtualized). I read through this entire thread and combed through numerous other resources online. I have one NIC connected to my cable modem. Feb 11, 2014 · Hi all i have ha big problem with my pfSense on my Proxmox3. Jan 7, 2025 · Have you tried e1000 virtual network interface instead of virtio? I have few virtualized firewalls deployment based on pfSense. I tried the pfsense lan interface attached to the same that proxmox is using as well with similar results. 4, pfsense 2. Apr 13, 2020 · With proxmox and low-end CPU (E5-2403v2), I'm able to push 500 mbit/s in AES-256-CBC / SHA256 (OPNsense 20. I pass through all the NIC pfsense uses. Physical Hardware: Mini PC with a Intel (R) Core (TM) i5-5250U CPU (latest 2018 microcode in use), 4 x I211 GigE Ports Running Proxmox Hypervisor (KVM) pfSense is running with 1Gb memory allocated pfSense is using VirtIO for Disc and Network PTI is disabled - both at the host level (using nopti on the Linux boot) and at the 2. So I switched to passing the interface through directly and downloading and compiling the intel ice drivers for FreeBSD/pfSense. May 31, 2022 · Knowledge base article on how to install pfSense as a VM on Proxmox. There are still good reasons to use passthrough NICs, especially on the WAN side, but it is no longer driven by performance. This provides additional parallel processing for the network adapter. I'd test using iperf rather than any server based test for bandwidth, as the bottleneck could be there. Network: 2 or more Virtio (bridged) Create a 8GB primary disk, Virtio (scsi, qcow2) Add pfSense-LiveCD-2. We will also add the QEMU Guest Agent to FreeBSD. You are also using very non-standard distros - BSD and Arch both. And this is with fairly modest HW (i3 n305). If you want that, use bridge interface on the host, put 2x NIC-port to the bridge, use virtio interfaces inside to the VM, example: Feb 10, 2025 · Hi, I have virtualized pfSense 2. Routing between two subnets, performance was slightly better (~500mbps), but again that saturated a single core. Good: pfSense can leverage NIC hardware offloading (if using Intel or other freeBSD supported hardware). 2 on proxmox 8. 6. Mar 30, 2020 · Hi, I run OPNsense 20. But agree with kapone, in many case, prefer hardware firewall ! Apr 13, 2020 · With proxmox and low-end CPU (E5-2403v2), I'm able to push 500 mbit/s in AES-256-CBC / SHA256 (OPNsense 20. Oct 10, 2018 · We are looking to create a basic pfSense template and its a requirement that "Disable hardware checksum offload" is set for VirtIO (massive performance difference in our environment). Feb 18, 2025 · Autonegotiate Non-default Speeds General Tuning VMware vmx (4) Interfaces Flow Control Hardware Tuning and Troubleshooting The underlying operating system beneath pfSense® software can be fine-tuned in several ways. Throughput during a speedtest: CPU consumption during a speedtest: The end goal would be to I agree, this would be a very good enhancement. I experienced weird cpu behavior on my pfSense running under proxmox, so for now I have switched over to OPNSense, which seems to work a lot better on my setup. Since OPNsense is a fork of pfSense, they should behave similarly. Don’t believe me, look at Feb 19, 2024 · Matter-of-fact, I have somewhat verified the "100% faster" claim: In my tests between two otherwise identical OpnSense and pfSense VM instances, they reached speeds of ~1. I’d imagine that these same concepts would apply well to any FreeBSD based router solution, such as PFsense, and some could even apply to other FreeBSD based solutions common in homelab environments, such as FreeNAS. One of the steps of setting up pfSense when using VirtIO interfaces in Proxmox VE i to disable hardware checksums. One limitation might be with BSD and 10gb routing speeds. Turns out my resources were strained and pfsense didn't like it. I never actually did a ipref of my setup to check that but have it with lacp to a 10gb switch EDIT: I tested the iperf3 performance on bare metal, and it is no better than virtualizing. Every mysterious problem or performance issue I've personally encountered were fixed by switching from VirtIO to E1000 driver. I tried multiple cables with the same result: - When I run iperf3 from a VM to Proxmox host, things are fast as expected (around 2. Jan 24, 2023 · 1. Decided to try virtio-net just to see if it was that much slower - exactly the same speed and CPU utilization! virtio_blk_load="YES" In the end with all 3 optimizations, the speed was still just 80mbps. u/avesalius pointed out that it seems to be a known issue that iperf performs very badly on pfsense for some reason (I've tested this NIC under ubuntu with iperf and it performs perfectly). This can be remedied by disabling two specific options in the network configuration of pfSense itself. Linux has the drivers built in since Linux 2. 5. Jul 7, 2022 · Greetings guys, I'll be thankful for your help with the following issue. 1 Gbits/s linux vms to other linux vms or proxmox host ~ 20 Gbits/s Freenas to proxmox ~ 2. We have a HA pair of pfSense (2. WAN and LAN) to the pfSense VM via PCIe passthrough + loop LAN to other VMs via switch and third NIC. 3-STABLE) running on KVM with 4xCPU and 4Gb of RAM, they both work with 10G NIC which is emulated in pfsense by VirtIO driver. dmesg: 000. Thanks in advance Nov 20, 2023 · Hi all, I've upgraded pfSense (it's a VM) from v2. no where near as bad as OPN. Configuring pfSense Software to work with Proxmox VirtIO After the pfSense installation and interfaces assignment is complete, connect to the assigned LAN port from another computer. For pfsense, I used virtIO bridges due to pci pass-through somehow is not working properly. The pfSense® project is a powerful open source firewall and routing platform based on FreeBSD. Dec 7, 2023 · On This Page Assumptions Basic Proxmox VE networking Creating a Virtual Machine Starting and configuring the virtual machine Disable Hardware Checksums with Proxmox VE VirtIO Booting UEFI Virtualizing with Proxmox® VE This following article is about building and running pfSense® software on a virtual machine under Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE). Aug 8, 2020 · Using VirtIO allows seemless migrations without worrying about physical card hardware also. OPNsense Interface Settings Switched virtual NIC type to E1000 from VirtIO, results are worst, switched back to VirtIO. with centos moving completely to kvm as of 6. Check. Hard to diagnose such faults without knowing in depth knowledge of the host. One way around this is to virtualize OPNsense or pfSense if you use a bridge interface for the WAN and the virtio NIC. I have a quad Intel NIC with the subject chipset. On another location, with 2 proxmox 3. 0 these virtio drivers would be essential for some deployments. Nov 7, 2020 · Slow LAN speed in OPNsense vs pfSense (w/ Proxmox)Really? In regards to what exactly? VM/VirtIO driver performance? Is there a changelog showing these changes? I updated to pfSense 2. My proxmox machine is a 24 x Intel (R) Xeon (R) CPU E5-2620 0 @ 2. However, in the PFSense web interface, the cards appear with speeds of 10Gbps if there is Help with OPNsense performance using PPPoE and workaround using Linux I use OPNsense as my main firewall-router on a decent x86 64-bit machine with multiple cores. 001218 [ 421] vtnet_netmap_attach max rings 8 vtnet0: netmap queues/slots: TX 8/ Apr 24, 2025 · The Zima Board 2 is a compact yet powerful single-board computer designed for homelab enthusiasts. On proxmox I use VirtIO network card, 10vCPU (Intel (R) Xeon (R) Silver 4114 CPU as a host), 16GiB od RAM, fast SSD drives for system. But I think that gets delivered in 2 to 3 weeks to europe, because of chinese holidays. 001100 [ 426] vtnet_netmap_attach virtio attached txq=1, txd=1024 rxq=1, rxd=1024 However, on a vanilla FreeBSD 11. 5, intel e1000 as virtio netword card : iperf around 235 Mbits. I have noticed that, despite Sep 24, 2021 · At least I know now there's no alternative for me but to wait for opnsense to improve virtio performance or switch to a hardware switch with NIC passthrough foregoing any Linux bridge benefits. After disconnecting my WAN temporarily, I tried to disable pf and run the test again. e. Iperf would show decent performance, while still far lower than linux guests. Disable all hardware offloading. 1 virtualized environment on a GA-IMB310TN mainboard with two on board Intel NICs. I also had throughput issues with e1000 (also high CPU usage). Dec 17, 2021 · I have pfSense running and as a VM with the usual setup: vmbr0 -> vLAN and vmbr1 -> vWAN . There are many potential causes for this condition, most of which are listed here along with possible Feb 18, 2025 · Learn how to set up pfSense on a Raspberry Pi using a virtual machine. Kernel State and Tunables The sysctl facility on FreeBSD allows managing certain aspects of the kernel state through a “Management Information Base” (MIB) style tree composed As mentioned in the title, I have very poor net performance. If the slowdown scales back with rules, you may want to give your pfsense all the advantages you can: more CPU, hardware nic, tuning, etc. For Linux VMs, virtio is a tad faster than E1000, IDK about FreeBSD. I’ve got increased network performance in 3 times compare to e1000 drivers !!!!. But I also tried e1000 and disabling Hardware offloading and Such, but that is not the culprit in this case. Connect a lan cable from modem to managed switch to some port (say port 8) Sep 23, 2018 · I believe that the 2. You may see better performance by deploying something like openswitch, but you are also likely to see even greater cpu load. It's bridged to a vmbr and my firewall also connects to this vmbr for WAN If I change the cards from being vtnet to em0 (i. Something similar is happening to me on my virtualized pfSense under KVM. 4GiB/s (10G not working): Hi, I deployed pfSense with vmxnet3 Interfaces on ESXI: Version 2. . My Expectation was that with vmxnet3 10G Interface would be available. I was following the configuration guide on Netgate's website and it outlined choosing VirtIO for the network card. What do you think is the best solution? I want to put PFsense as a frontend for my VMs under Proxmox. I had abysmal performance using virtio network drivers. Aug 3, 2024 · IDK why the virtio emulation does not work for you, however even if you use E1000 emulation, it ist just that this is the presentation to the OpnSense VM. 5 Gbits/s The configurations are pretty standard. But let's just assume pfSense in VirtualBox on a Host with 2 physical NICs is all we have to use. My setup looks like this: |pfsense| XXXX|XXXX VLAN1 | VLAN2 SRV1 | SRV2 For pfsense, I am using three virtio network adapters: net0: virtio bridge=vmbr0 net1: virtio bridge=vmbr1 net2: virtio bridge=vmbr1 On the Mar 12, 2022 · Drop virtual box and use KVM with virtio drivers +1 I was testing kvm VM network speeds recently, spent some time getting SR-IOV working in a KVM with 20Gbit bonded NICs - got full speed as expected. 5gbe, and of course, that includes my trusty TrueNAS boxes I've been using the RT8125 based NICs, and after a bunch of searching and info from this forum got them working, at 2. With v2. 1 KVM 4 Cores One virtio nic Feb 16, 2023 · For a qemu proxmox guest PFSense acts weriedly with the network speed- it gets extremely slow. I had to reserve cpu and memory resources to get performance back Long version: I've been trying to setup a custom pfSense box with 'old parts'. I have the following: - Core i3 Intel processor - 12GB RAM - 120GB SSD - 2 x gigabit NICs When my laptop is connected directly to the ATT supplied router/modem, I get very close to 1gbps up and down. Without AES-NI, I was only able to get about 48Mbit/s with one of the router's cores being maxed out at 100%. 5 Gbps after disabling all the HW offloading. Instead there is only the Option Autoselect visible in Interface Configuration and Bandwith is Dec 19, 2021 · The best set up probably depends on other details of your application. The advantages of doing so are: Minimize the attack surface of my router Allow use of all hardware features of my NIC, optimising performance and power consumption Simplify network Hey there! I have just virtualized my pfSense router and I'm seeing some issues with performance on data transfer. Sep 9, 2012 · Hello all! What would be a "Best Practice" deployment of pfSense using VBox, for "a home network"? It's understood that bare metal is the optimal way to run pfSense, closely followed by a Type 1 hypervisor like ESXi. May 12, 2023 · Firewall administrators familiar with FreeBSD, or users acting under the direction of a developer or support representative, may want to adjust or add values on this page so that they will be set as the system starts. I would try the virtual interfaces, they have much better performance. If i use pfSense without virtualization, the wan speed is perfect (2x 150Mbit/s b Nov 17, 2022 · Use the VirtIO network device type. ISP requires PPPoE I have a 100/20 Fibre Ethernet RedminePhysical Hardware: Mini PC with a Intel (R) Core (TM) i5-5250U CPU (latest 2018 microcode in use), 4 x I211 GigE Ports Running Proxmox Hypervisor (KVM) pfSense is running with 1Gb memory allocated pfSense is using VirtIO for Disc and Network PTI is disabled - both at the host level (using nopti on the Linux boot) and at the 2. VirtIO is the interface of choice for Proxmox users and this problem can become troublesome. 00GHz (2 Sockets) and I gave the pfSense VM 4 cores with 10gb RAM. Apparently, FreeBSD doesn't have good virtio drivers, but VyOS (linux based) does have good virtio drivers and thus can get good performance, but at this point, I might as well run bare metal since I can't virtualize them both at acceptable performance Nov 9, 2023 · Artemisfan submitted a new resource: Virtualizing pfSense Firewall on Synology DSM Virtual Machine Manager: - pfSense install guide for Synology DSM So, if you are like me and you have applications like Plex or VPN that you need to be able to reach outside of your home you want a powerful Jul 10, 2022 · Hello all! I've been trying to upgrade the performance critical portions of my home network to 2. A few of these tunables are available under Advanced Options (See System Tunables). However, on the same HW I get over 7 Gbit running Speedtest if I do passthru of the NIC's. Testing routing between VMs on the same LAN, I can route at 20+ GB/sec. Dec 24, 2021 · If you passthrough the NIC-card to the VM, you giving the entire-card to the VM, not just the ports on it, after you cant use on the host amongs the other VMs ( net0: virtio" doesnt make any sense ). 1 last night, which went okay with no issues. Oct 15, 2015 · Hello mmenaz, CPU ressource is enough for that. 150Mbps to >600Mbps, probably woulud have been fast if my internet was quicker. Currently, 8 is the maximum value for this setting. Speedtest from OPNsense is also around 200. Speedtest when directly connecting an end device to Is there any benefit to use PCI pass through so pfsense see the real NICs instead of bridging them on the VM host with virtio cards going into pfsense? I seem to saturate the 1Gbps anyways so I'm just curious about other hw features. Otherwise virtio NICs do not work correctly. I also only tested VyOS, CHR, and pfSense, since the Debian and OPNSense numbers were largely duplicative. Second, in the PFSense webconsole- In pfSense GUI, System > Advanced > Networking > Tick on- Disable hardware checksum offload Disable hardware TCP segmentation offload Disable hardware large Jan 24, 2012 · Since I am new at FreeBSD platform can someone give a guidenance how would I have virtio drivers on pfSense 2. 3, od SSD, ZFS with deduplication and compression. Apr 14, 2021 · Using direct PCI passthrough and virtio drivers gave me the best performance at 2. Mar 27, 2022 · HI I want to enhance my home server infrastructure with an advance firewall solution based on opnsense, pfsense or ipfire in a virtualized enviorment based on proxmox. Set the Multiqueue setting to 8. Works-For-Me with: PFSense 2. Oct 27, 2022 · The maximum I could hit using a VirtIO bridge was about 6. 0a (FreeBSD 12) just to check and performance is just slightly lower . I have experienced some really weird iperf tests running the server on pfsense where it did not represent the real raw numbers, but when I ran through pfsense the numbers were higher. Are you passing through nics to this setup or using virtualized nic hardware? Although virtio is very good, there is no Jun 24, 2017 · Hi All, Our ISP has ran fibre to our location and requires us to authenticate via PPPoE to get online. 0 and OPNsense uses 11. So her goes the little tweaks that worked for me- First, I chose Intel E1000 Interfaces instead VirtIO. In a recent test, it was configured to run Proxmox (a virtualization platform), Ubuntu (a popular Linux distribution), and pfSense (a firewall/router solution) simultaneously. 7. 1 environement. Ain't nothing wrong with cluster itself but recently we started to observe high CPU Some generic and arguably helpful pointers to check: Ensure vhost_net kernel module is loaded and kvm host is started with vhost=on, this uses the in-kernel accelerator for virtio, which has a significant impact. Feb 22, 2021 · I am installing pfSense on the latest version of Proxmox. Having run PfSense virtualised for a long time, one of the first thing I've noticed was that FreeBSD's VirtIO networking drivers were quite often problematic. Have not tried VirtIO on this machine though, but would I'm currently using a Supermicro A1SRi-2758F board and gave Pfsense 2 sockets and 2 cores, 2gb RAM and currently using the VirtIO drivers (They have yielded the best performance). ISP requires PPPoE I have a 100/20 Fibre Jan 16, 2019 · I'm running pfSense on Proxmox with 2 vcpu + 2 GB RAM + 10 GB hard disk. Some also benefit by disabling TSO in system tunables across the board. My question is would I get better throughput and performance if I use PCI Passthrough instead? I have a Gibabit Internet connection and I want to ensure I get the best Nov 27, 2018 · You can't say "VirtualBox" along with "performance and stability" in the same sentence. 8Gbit/sec using a virtual networked bridge. Apr 6, 2015 · Quite stable. Jan 17, 2024 · 3) pfSense 2. I have ordered a new device with Intel Nics to compare with the realtek nics. Jul 6, 2022 · With the current state of VirtIO network drivers in FreeBSD, it is necessary to disable hardware checksum offload to reach systems (at least other VM guests, possibly others) protected by pfSense software directly from the VM host. Jul 2, 2015 · Hello! I am getting very poor networking performance under OpenVZ. Motherboard have 2x Intel Xeon CPU E5310 @ 1,60 Ghz I have intalled debian 8. 5gb line rate on my Apr 25, 2014 · Which of those two NIC emulators (or paravirtualized network drivers) performs better with high PPS throughput to KVM guests? Google lacks results on this one and it would be interesting to know if anyone benchmarked both with Proxmox and to what kind of conclusion they came. CentOS 7. Aug 16, 2023 · @yobyot said in Do you have performance tips for Proxmox virtualized pfSense?: Should I bother with physical switches so that the LAN and OPTx interfaces can run on physical PCI interfaces instead of Proxmox virtual bridges? It's all about your setup as to whether your requirement needs a switch or not. Iperf tests between this vm and a debian vm on the same proxmox host also with a virtio interface attached to vmbr0 run at 35Gbit/s with a single thread and default iperf settings. OPNsense Interface Settings Dec 18, 2016 · How can there be a "passthrough" virtio? Do you use macvtap maybe? In any case, it is normal for a fully virtualized guest to have more overhead than a container. 0-RELEASE (amd64) built on Mon Jan 31 19:57:53 UTC 2022, FreeBSD 12. Oct 7, 2018 · Hi @stephenw10 , Thanks for the reply. Default OpenVPN performance was abysmal. Yesterday the firewall crashed completely. This increases performance a little and avoids problems using virtio NICs. I know FreeBSD has some issues with virtio network interfaces that explains the two *sense products behaving the way they do (and I'd prefer not to host-side disable offload, the guest-side settings my research tripped over didn't seem to help), but I'm really confounded that the three Linux based products behave so equally poorly (while Opnsense (and probably pfsense) has native support for virtio driver which provides best performance in a vm. E1000, VirtIO, RTL8139 and vmxnet3 I have a mix of windows & linux clients, and currently using a mix of all these, except for Apr 17, 2016 · Then you're going to have to find out the equivalent command to disable checksum offload for the pfsense virtio interfaces on the hypervisor side as we do in xen (eg "ethtool -K eth0 tx off" ) for each pfsense virtual interface on the hypervisor. My other VMs also use VirtIO network interfaces. I used the e1000 nics due to the recommendation of the IDS/IPS requirement. I was following the configuration guide on Netgate’s website and it outlined choosing VirtIO for the network card. 8 as stable FreeBSD has the drivers built in since 9. Theoretically, it is not limited to 1000 MBit/s, but rather by the emulation efficiency and the performance on the VM itself. If required for compatibility reasons, e1000 can be used. General VirtIO Use virtIO for disk and network for best performance. 1, things Dec 28, 2013 · boot pfsense and assign VirtIO networking adapters and test new level of speed. 4 with a virtio inteface bridged to vmbr0. Disk and Network Interface Type: Set both the disk and network interfaces to VirtIO. I noticed my virtio net only has a single queue. I avoid using openvswitch bridge for perimeter or edge virtual firewall. Furthermore, out network infrastructure consists of a cable modem and a dumb May 21, 2025 · @ louis2 I run my pfsense virtualized and have been able to get around 4 Gbit speed using Proxmox VirtIO. I also tried setting the VMs’ CPUs to ‘host’, but the result was the same. And just for completeness sake, I posted the best run I got from OPN as well Things that I’ve done to get my speed (1Gb) to nearly bare metal: Assign CPU host with AES enabled to the OPNsense VM. Configuring Disk and Network Interfaces When deploying pfSense as a virtual machine, ensure that the disk and network interfaces are configured for optimal performance. 4. pfSense is driving them via PPPoE vlan interfaces vs 2. Disabled hardware offload in OPNsense. 8 comes with a kernel that has VirtIO support already integrated so you should be fine selecting VirtIO. Pfsense has 4 cores, 4 GB May 9, 2024 · on pfsense 2. First of all, what kind of CPU impact does that have? Second, has this recommendation changed in anyway with pfSense 2. You can test whether suricata is slowing down your connection because of inspection penalty by disabling half the inspection rules. I have read PFsense with 10gbs nice can’t route 10gb no matter the specs. Aug 23, 2019 · The painfully low pfSense and CHR numbers made me really believe that there was an incompatibility somewhere. parallel flows, IPv4 vs. Proxmox is using Open vSwitch. Maybe CHR and pfSense just really don’t like the virtio drivers. Enabling IP Fast Forwarding also helps some. Here's the proposed set-up: Fibre -> GBIC -> Switch (vlan 35 tagged) -> pfSense (currently a consumer grade router) My consumer router (ASUS RT-N66U) can get close, but it's bottlenecked by the CPU. ensure the Open vSwitch packages are up to date from the debian repositories (this sounds obvious but I've had small updates be night and day in terms of performance, more than once Apr 5, 2016 · I also have pfsense virtualized on proxmox. What is the difference between the three? In other words, what should I consider when choosing the device model? Googling “virtio vs e1000 vs rtl8139” didn't help much. Despite the terrible reputation, FreeBSD-based routers like OPNsense and pfSense can work with multi-threaded PPPoE if your WAN uses a paravirtualized NIC like virtio. 0] (x86-64-v2-AES CPU + virtio enet) To test, I run an iperf server out on my LAN. Jul 6, 2022 · On This Page Guides Virtualization pfSense® software supports a variety of Type-1 (bare metal/native) and Type-2 (hosted) virtualization environments, such as VMware (vSphere, Fusion or Workstation), Proxmox VE, VirtualBox, Xen, KVM, Hyper-V and so on. VirtIO interfaces assigned to VM with multiqueue at 4. 2-RELEASE-amd64. Changed the network driver to e1000 and it fixed my performance network wise. I will further Years ago I had a virtualized pfsense instance and had random issues with performance. 6 (in use as my firewall) and also LCX for test purposes. It rebooted okay and everything came back online. I never checked if this affected CPU performance. Also if your machine is running some very heavy processes in other vm's they too can have some influence on the performance of the machine overall, especially if you have over provisioned. EDIT: Wanted to include that I do not use any passthrough. I use virtio whenever possible and that is also recommended specifically in the pfsense docs. I am now confused as to what it might be causing. As this would allow my do this in a power and cost effiecent way, while still allow me to utilizing the 10G connection from my I originally had my pfSense VMs set to 4 vCPUs (originally in VMware) but pruned them down to 1 and so no change in performance. remove the VirtIO ethernet card in Proxmox and replace it with the e1000 card) then I get performance back where I expect it to be. 2 with virtio : good iperf test, 941 Mbits Another test, I have changed LAN pfSsense bridged to intel gigabit CT desktop card : same result. 0_5,1 installed. Your setup is definitely overkill and should have no problem. Feb 1, 2022 · Bad performance on Proxmox with Realtek NICs and/or virtIO BridgeI have a simlple setup. I have virtio drivers and pfSense tops at 450-460mbps at most, but other VMs on the same phisical host and also with virtio drivers have no trouble getting 1Gbps speeds. The guide also applies to any newer Proxmox Nov 17, 2015 · Did you try configuring the network interface in kvm to use virtio rather than emulating some other hardware? I'm not sure if pfsense has the drivers to support virtio but if it does then you should get near native speed. I have one NIC going through PCI Forward the needed network interfaces (i. So for performance you want to use VirtIO. virtio (vtnet). In my testing they showed significantly reduced CPU load. 1 in a proxmox 6. 0 to v2. This guide covers installation, as well as some configuration settings. This is a problem caused by the use of the virtual NICs we use (VirtIO) and the underlying physical NICs. 0 Windows requires the Windows VirtIO Jun 19, 2025 · It might not make much of a difference in Proxmox itself performance wise, but it should have impact on performance in Pfsense/Opnsense, as the "modern" virtio driver should support multiqueue in the BSD VM, which the legacy version lacks. ) I'm not sure what else I should try either at the NIC level or the hypervisor Dec 2, 2019 · Honestly, I have had challenges getting reasonable network performance out of the HP T620 even when I ran pfSense bare metal, so it may just be that this Realtek chip set with whatever firmware it has is just crap, and if so, so be it, I'll use it for something less network intensive. The other approach would just be to use the standard virtio NIC from KVM, but the recommendation with older versions of pfSense has been to disable the hardware checksum offloading. It isn't up to that task. Mar 1, 2024 · if i do the same on WAN interface of my PfSense as target fast on vmbr1 (WAN): fast on vmbr0 (LAN Through PfSense ) I don't understand as LAN is using virtIO ( so 10Gbps announced) , enough CPU , memory ? My PFsense is also i guess well configured : in advance, thanks for your tips ! Jul 10, 2020 · 23 When creating a virtual machine on Ubuntu, I have a choice between three device models for the virtual network interface: virtio, e1000 and rtl8139. - VirtIO : paravirtualization, allows to use different router/firewall at the same time without exclusive access but lower performances, - PCI Passthrough: maximum performance but network card monopolized by PFsense exclusively. Jun 11, 2024 · Use the VirtIO network device type. Watch the Aug 4, 2023 · My pfSense VM has two VirtIO network interfaces: one for the WAN and one for the LAN. iso ISO as an optical drive Options, use tablet for pointers: No (you don't have to use mouse to manage it, if disabled reduces interrupts) Network Virtio consideration In the guest network interfaces names are like 'vtnetX' Virtualized pfSense - passthru NIC or bridged - performance I'm mostly curious about this based on a forum post I saw elsewhere For a couple of years, I've been running pfSense virtualized under Proxmox with zero problems. But agree with kapone, in many case, prefer hardware firewall ! Aug 22, 2019 · On proxmox, I am hosting pfsense 2. My question is would I get better throughput and performance if I use I happened to be testting a new router in my home lab this week and noticed that my speeds were about 4x what I saw on my pfSense install running on Proxmox. Jan 27, 2023 · I attached a virtio vtnet interface to pfsense and made a better comparison with single vs. Actually, 784 Mbit is normal for my gigabit home network but I don't understand this huge performance impact when darkstat is enabled. I just setup two virtual nics using Aug 9, 2016 · There exists a bug in the FreeBSD VirtIO network drivers that massively degrades network throughput on a pfSense server. Everything is on the same vmbr bridge and using virtio. I tried changing the network interface of one of my Windows VMs to Intel E1000, but the problem persists. 3 guest level. Only with vlans and some Firewall rules. Feb 19, 2024 · Matter-of-fact, I have somewhat verified the "100% faster" claim: In my tests between two otherwise identical OpnSense and pfSense VM instances, they reached speeds of ~1. 24 as experimental, and since Linux 3. I get similar or perhaps slightly better performance on an i5 11400 with passthru of the NICs. 2 CPU:2 RAM:2 Interface:vmxnet3 open-vm-tools 10. 0, the CPU usage shows under 5% most of the time in the web interface. It is also running ddns and wireguard. IPv6, and coming from physical port (ix) vs. I recently upgraded my Internet connection to 1 Gbit/s down - 300 Mbit/s up. Mar 18, 2020 · I install Bandwidthd and bam, speed drops to 200 Mbps in iperf3 test between pfsense and proxmox host. 98 Gbits/sec) Mar 29, 2023 · Dear all, I recently changed my physical pfsense by virtualizing it on Proxmox, after that using 3 Gigabit network interfaces when I do a speed test on the links the speed does not exceed 100 Mbps. Unfortunately, my WAN download speed refused to exceed 12 or 13Mbit, usually it was even lower, despite my 200Mbit uplink speed. I am on 19. 2 [FreeBSD 14. Feb 16, 2021 · I am installing pfSense on the latest version of Proxmox. Remeber to check the "Disable hardware checksum offload" in pfSense settings. pfsense to proxmox ~ 2. My config has many vlans (~100), a lot of IPSec tunnels (~20), a few OpenVPN servers etc. Aug 23, 2023 · Networking Virtual pfSense on Proxmox We all need firewalls, and we can virtualize them or use HW versions It's best practice to use hardware firewalls. This is what you need to do: Setup your modem first, connect laptop directly to modem and make sure your laptop can get an ip and internet works. 3. You can dramatically improve performance by using multiqueue virtio driver settings but then you cant use ALTQ (QOS) support in pfSense. I think there is something with pfSense and not the Hypervisor configuration. Proxmox intel nic is a 82541pi intel pci nic and the intel nics used by pfsense (via virtio) are 82574L intel pcie nics. Why does pfsense virtio performance suck compared to vanilla freebsd? I have a fresh install of freebsd 11 on proxmox 4. By chance, I discovered that when using IPsec, a virtual machine with pfSense rests on CPU performance. 7), the virtual machine config cpu "host" and nic "virtio", and AES-NI box checked in the guest (don't test without). Oct 12, 2024 · Switch to VirtIO: The VirtIO driver is designed to provide better performance compared to other network card types like Intel E1000 or Realtek. 4 under qemu/libvirt, my vtnet adapter only ends up with 1 tx/rx queue, which introduces a big performance limit. Performance in a VM is good. Screenshot attached for proof. We did some experiment trying to measure network performance overhead in virtualization environment, comparing between VFIO passthrough and virtio approaches. This setup demonstrates the board’s capability to handle multiple critical workloads in a small form factor. Also I use VirtIO network devices instead of E1000. iperf from these VMs to the test server gives me ~8Gbps from the Ubuntu machine but both the FreeBSD VMs only give me ~700Mbps. Dec 24, 2021 · All this load and the resulting low performance come from the fact that you are trying to use pfSense to emulate a high-performance layer 3 switch which is something that is normally built at the silicon level in an asic. When upgraded to v2. This provided the best performance in my testing. #pfsense #virtual #router #firewall Nov 10, 2021 · @sokosko said in vmxnet 3 only autoselect available - limited to 1. I was thinking of something like the Pro 3400GE for ecc. Does pfSense support multiqueue virtio? Even though I am not experiencing a performance Feb 4, 2012 · If you could do something like this to test pfSense's routing performance using e1000 interfaces with iperf it would be more helpful: client -> NIC1 -> vmbr0 -> e1000 -> pfsense -> e1000 -> vmbr1 -> virtio or physical NIC2 -> client 2 My guess is that you too will get very bad performance far below gigabit speeds with very high CPU usage. Using emulated network interfaces can cause additional load/overhead. 0. The VM and virtio NIC processes PPPoE frames with all cores in the VM. 2 GBit/s in either direction (slow because of virtio networking). I don't have a network of Proxmox servers so live migration is not an option in my use case. 7 using i440fx/kvm with virtio enabled in tunables. Developed and maintained by Netgate®. org, I get 000. 1 but I did not try pfSense with e1000 nics only virtio nics. Mar 1, 2016 · I had exactly the same experience with proxmox and pfsense (whether this is a wider kvm/virtio/freebsd issue I cannot say as have not used on other platforms). Using iperf3, I can route at 1 GB/sec between 2 desktops connected by a switch on my virtualized pfSense's LAN. I would try to reproduce the issue on Centos as guest and host before anything else Aug 25, 2020 · I have multi-gigabit Internet and recently decided to transition to an OPNsense server running inside of a Proxmox VM with Virtio network adapters as my main router at home, not realizing at the time that so many performance issues existed. 1. This way, assuming I got it correctly, Linux simply forwards the Ethernet frames on the bridge and doesn’t do any processing. Nov 1, 2013 · I have have successfully configured 3 ADSL2+ modems to work with a pfSense VM Each modem is plugged into our DLINk DGS-1210 Switch (ports 1,2 & 3) Ports 1,2 &3 are on VLANS 101, 102 & 103 respectively. even if you remove the package from pfsense, you will never get same gigabit speed again ever. Whilst doing that, the OpnSense VM had ~80% load, whereas the pfSense VM only had 40%. 1? Searched back and forth but I did not find the answer. I've also tried different Ethernet cables in the off chance there was something funny going on - no difference. I use a i3-8100 with 8gbs of ram and it’s plenty. Host to guest VM network performance was about 4. Experience shows having a smart switch opens more network control opportunities to a Jun 30, 2020 · VirtIO is paravirtualized while e1000 is emulated. However, I found something different. 4Gbit/sec. This leaves only poor performance network drivers for kvm virtualization. Using top -aSH command, I could see high percentage figures in idle section for CPU. I've tried a lot of things, changing drivers from virtio to e1000e, PCI passthru of the physical NIC, FreeBSD tuning guides and a lot more, all No other tweaks really had impact on performance so far, apart from disabling HW IBRS (hardware mitigation for the Spectre exploit), although I believe pfSense disables that by default (according to my test install and check) Mar 6, 2021 · I had been running pfsense with the virtio nic emulation and network interface settings as per the recommendations from Netgate and I have a 10Gb hardware nic on vmbr0 which all my VM's use for LAN including pfSense. My ISP offers 10Gbps and I want to upgrade my PFSense server to support those speeds and was curious if anyone has a cpu recommendation. 2 install using the image provided by freebsd. 1-BETA0 The pfSense® project is a powerful open source firewall and routing platform based on FreeBSD. Not saying you are gonna get anywhere near 10+ gbps speeds but I have seen some odd things. Use virtio network interfaces where possible. 5 Gbits/s proxmox (or any vm) to pfsense ~ 1. The setup is as follows: Cable modem (TC4400) <-> LAN cable <-> PCIe network card (old RTL Gigabit) -PCIe-Passthrough-> Proxmox <-> Switch From possible 1000 MBit/s i only get around 200. This guide covers installation, optimization, advanced VPN configurations, and key performance tips for secure home networks. 3-p1 using 11. That said, pfSense includes VIRTIO drivers in the Sep 9, 2021 · Performance tuning when running as KVM Started by t0mc@, September 09, 2021, 06:52:22 PM Previous topic - Next topic Does one still need to switch off "hardware" offloading on pfSense nowadays when using VirtIO? That was a thing at least a couple of years ago. However, when running pfsense in qemu-kvm under linux, the driver is not loaded and no network devices are found. Jun 13, 2024 · Just wanted to double check with the community if passing a NIC card directly to a VM instead of using Proxmox virtIO will cause me to lose my pfSense + license. Nov 22, 2016 · I'll keep playing around with this at report back here if I encounter any issues, but at least with the latest Ubuntu and pfSense software and Atom C2358 hardware, there seems to be a significant performance increase to using hardware offloading coupled with the virtio drivers. Changing to virtio solved the issue. IMO performance is not goot, when I did iperf from VM to VM, between Feb 1, 2018 · This is probably common knowledge to many people, but I'm trying to find out what the differences are with the performance of virtual network cards Proxmox supports. I know this is sort of a "Well Jan 26, 2024 · On This Page Insufficient Hardware Hardware/Driver Tuning Required Duplex Mismatch Traffic Shaping MTU Issues VPN + MTU Issues WAN Connection Client/Testing Method ISP Issues Troubleshooting Low Interface Throughput In situations where the firewall is not transferring as much data as desired. So, that is unrelated to the virtualization issues. gtwbrfuo uzwey atwid vgo iczaqbu tbskre fneg bugypkh irwaf rcdkhf