[SOLVED] OPNSense running as a VM on Proxmox, always using 100% Memory

[fbeye]

Hi there, I know this may very well be OPNSense, but wanted to make sure I had it set right on Prox...

I have set it to 32 GIG, it 100% maxes, 64 GIG 100% maxes.. No matter what I set, it maxes! I DID turn off Ballooning... Is there any other thing I should be look at?
Also, when Prox says 100% utilization, within OPNSense, it is like 4-12% usage.

 

[Dunuin]

Do you maybe passthrough any NICs? With PCI passthrough always the full RAM will be used.

 

[fbeye]

Well, to say passthrough, I do not recall...
I have 4 Physical NIC's, and "assigned" 2 of them to the VM.. LAN/WAN. My CPU's are set to use "Host" Processors, not any virtualization of them.. How would I verify a passthrough?
The NIC's are using VirtIO..?

 

[Dunuin]

When using virtio you are not passing them through: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/PCI_Passthrough

 

[fbeye]

That makes sense, I wonder why would one passthrough if it becomes unusable for rest of server machine? Maybe to allot all of it's resources I assume.
So, I mean it appears passthrough is not my issue?

 

[leesteken]

Are the QEMU Guest Agent and/or the VirtIO Balloon driver installed, loaded and running inside your VM? Otherwise Proxmox does not know how much memory is currently in use (and it only sees that all memory was touched at some point).

 

[Dunuin]

Yes, passthrough would allow the VM to make use of hardware offloading, better NIC performance because the VM can directly access the packet queues without the PVE host in between and might also increase security when your insecure WAN traffic isn't going over your PVE host.

 

[Dunuin]

Are the QEMU Guest Agent and/or the VirtIO Balloon driver installed, loaded and running inside your VM? Otherwise Proxmox does not know how much memory is currently in use (and it only sees that all memory was touched at some point).

There is the QEMU guest agent plugin that can be installed in OPNsense but keep in mind that this isn't fully featured. Not sure if stuff like ballooning is actually supported yet. Stuff like consistent snapshot-mode backups is not.

 

[fbeye]

Are the QEMU Guest Agent and/or the VirtIO Balloon driver installed, loaded and running inside your VM? Otherwise Proxmox does not know how much memory is currently in use (and it only sees that all memory was touched at some point).

Unless OPNSense did it by it's own, I did not. I just download OPNS ISO, booted the image, installed it and set it up.

 

[leesteken]

Unless OPNSense did it by it's own, I did not. I just download OPNS ISO, booted the image, installed it and set it up.

And that's why Proxmox can only see that all memory inside the VM is touched and assumes it is used.

 

[fbeye]

Fair enough.

 

[fbeye]

Would

Are the QEMU Guest Agent and/or the VirtIO Balloon driver installed, loaded and running inside your VM? Otherwise Proxmox does not know how much memory is currently in use (and it only sees that all memory was touched at some point).

Would this be recommended? I would like to try and do so, even simply for educational purposes.

 

[leesteken]

Would this be recommended? I would like to try and do so, even simply for educational purposes.

The Proxmox manual recommends you to install QEMU Guest Agent, if it's available for the operating system inside the VM, because of filesystem flush for backups as well: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#qm_qemu_agent

 

[fbeye]

Alright. So I installed qemu-agent on Opnsense [in VM]. Now in Proxmox I am enabling Agent on the VM..

 

[fbeye]

Both enabled... How do I..Verify? Like other than stats and what not accurately passing through, what would one use qemu guest for?

 

[Dunuin]

Without the guest agent there will be no communication between the PVE host and the guestOS inside the VM. So no ballooning, no snapshot-mode backups you can count on, no IPs shown in webUI, no RAM usage reported from the view of the guest OS and so on.