How to bridge VM NIC to physical NIC of FreeNAS 11?

[RAurelian]

Hi all,

Sorry if this has already been answered, but I could not find it. I`m using FreeNAS-11.0-U4 (54848d13b) [updated from 9.3] and am trying to create a Windows 10 VM, which all works OK (the OS has installed OK, got networking and can use the VM). However, I have 2 NICs on my FreeNAS server and would like to bridge the NIC of the Windows 10 VM to NIC2 of the FreeNAS server and not to NIC1.

When adding / editing the NIC interface for the VM I do not have any option to select a bridge, just the adapter type. I was able to bridge VM NICs in the past when I was using the phpVirtualBox jail on FreeNAS 9.3. Is the a way to achieve this in v11?

Thank you,
Aurelian

 

[dlavigne]

I'm pretty sure this feature is coming in 11.1. If it's not in BETA1 (slated for Oct 23), please let us know.

 

[chris crude]

According to an update 3 days ago by someone named dlavigne, target version was changed from 11.1 Release to 11.1BETA1 https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/24571
I have been tracking this for a while now and have pointed other people in these forums who have asked about choosing NIC interface for VMs to that bug report

 

[RAurelian]

Hey Chris,

Thank you for the information - it`s good news that this feature is planned for the near future. I`ll have to see how to work around this for now, but it`s something to hope for at least.

Best,
Aurelian

 

[RegularJoe]

can't we make the bridge and tap interface now in the tune-ables and then pick it when we make the VM? I have it running CentOS 7 x64 in a bhyve VM on an older Intel i5 650 and it works to bridge the functional interface that FreeNAS uses. I will have to read on how to get those TAP and BRIDGE devices to be created and persistent.

I am looking at using pfSense as a FW/Router for a LAB. I know in VMware we can disable CDP/LLDP on those Ethernet/vSwitch ports.

 

[Journer]

can't we make the bridge and tap interface now in the tune-ables and then pick it when we make the VM? I have it running CentOS 7 x64 in a bhyve VM on an older Intel i5 650 and it works to bridge the functional interface that FreeNAS uses. I will have to read on how to get those TAP and BRIDGE devices to be created and persistent.

I am looking at using pfSense as a FW/Router for a LAB. I know in VMware we can disable CDP/LLDP on those Ethernet/vSwitch ports.

If anyone knows how to do this, please share. Been trying to get my VMs on a VLAN for some time now...

 

[RegularJoe]

looks like there are not enough ways for us to configure the networking with bhyve, so your going to have to make a etherchannel trunk and stuff VLAN's on that. Once that is done you should be able to make the bridge/tap for the VM. I will be doing some testing on my lab machine

 

[RAurelian]

Unfortunately the bHyve virtualization system has far less features than what we`ve had with phpVirtualBox, this bridging being amongst the least important. I`m actually unhappy that phpVBox was removed before bHyve reached at least similar in features and capabilities. For now I`ll stick with VMware for the virtualization part and FreeNAS for the storage part.

We`ll see if things improve in the future.

 

[chris crude]

Or, 11.1 Beta was just released afew days ago. I'm sure someone here will try it soon and report back if this function has been added as advertised.

 

[KrisBee]

Or, 11.1 Beta was just released afew days ago. I'm sure someone here will try it soon and report back if this function has been added as advertised.

Appears to be in the FreeNAS 11 nightlies since a couple of days ago. WebUI allows selection from dorp-down list of configured interfaces when adding a NIC device to a VM.

 

[RAurelian]

Well, I updated to FreeNAS 11.1 U1 and now I can bridge the virtual NIC to the physical NIC I want. However, now regardless how I set up the VM, Windows 10 install freezes half-way though.. At least in 11.0 U4 I was able to install Windows 10, but it would BSoD any time a program would try to invoke anything 3D. So this new virtualization system is a major step back from phpVirtualBox and I`m sorry I upgraded from 9.3..

 

[RAurelian]

In case anyone is curious: I managed to finally get a Windows 10 VM running if I installed it with just 1 CPU and no devices, except VNC, HDD (AHCI) and CD (so no NIC!). After it got installed, I installed all of the VirtIO drivers I could install + I added the following System Tunables in the FreeNAS GUI:
(Type: Loader) hw.vmm.topology.cores_per_package: 4
(Type: Loader) hw.vmm.topology.threads_per_core: 2

After this, I allocated 6 CPUs and it works OK. I could also allocate NIC (even VirtIO) without issues and bridge it to one of the 2 NICs in my system.