Install pfSense in KVM on Ubuntu 10.10

The blog post describes how to install the firewall distribution pfSense based on FreeBSD in a kernel based virtual machine (KVM) on Ubuntu 10.10.

Specialities: you either need two NICs or a single one with VLANs as pfSense requires you to define at least one WAN and one LAN interface.

First, get the live cd (choose from a mirror on the download site for pfsense):

wget http://mirror.fleximus.org/pfsense/downloads/pfSense-1.2.3-RELEASE-LiveCD-Installer.iso.gz
gunzip pfSense-1.2.3-RELEASE-LiveCD-Installer.iso.gz

Then create a kvm virtual machine and install pfSense (enter 99 after boot up of the live cd)

sudo virt-install \
--name pfsense \
--ram 512 \
--vcpus=1 \
--os-variant freebsd7 \
--hvm \
--network=bridge:br0,model=ne2k_pci,mac=00:00:00:00:00:17 \
--network=bridge:br1,model=ne2k_pci,mac=00:00:00:00:00:18 \
--vnc \
--cdrom pfSense-1.2.3-RELEASE-LiveCD-Installer.iso \
--disk path=pfSense-1.2.3.img,size=4

Continue with the installation just as you would on a regular machine.

resources

• The official website of pfSense: http://www.pfsense.org/
• http://retenodus.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/how-to-install-pfsense-with-kvm-and-libvirt/