pfSense Qemu Guest Agent

Published: 2022-12-01

Intro

I use Proxmox for my hypervsior and recently installed pfSense as a firewall. I use the QEMU Guest Agent to get more detailed info about the VM's that are running in the Proxmox console.

This post shows the process to get the QEMU Guest Agent running on a pfSense firewall.

Software Versions

The following software versions were used in this post.

  • pfSense Community Edition - 2.6.0
  • QEMU Guest Agent - 5.0.1

Install

Install the qemu-guest-agent package.

text
pkg install -y qemu-guest-agent

Once installed, there is a note on how to setup the agent.

text
=======================================================
Modify your `/etc/rc.conf` by adding these settings

qemu_guest_agent_enable="YES"
qemu_guest_agent_flags="-d -v -l /var/log/qemu-ga.log"

and run
# service qemu-guest-agent start

For detailed help use `qemu-ga -h`
=======================================================

Configure

I am following the steps in the script here (with slight modifications).

Append to the /etc/rc.conf.local file.

shell
cat >> /etc/rc.conf.local << EOF
qemu_guest_agent_enable="YES"
qemu_guest_agent_flags="-d -v -l /var/log/qemu-ga.log"
#virtio_console_load="YES"
EOF

Create the /usr/local/etc/rc.d/qemu-agent.sh file.

shell
cat > /usr/local/etc/rc.d/qemu-agent.sh << EOF
#!/bin/sh
sleep 3
service qemu-guest-agent start
EOF

Make the /usr/local/etc/rc.d/qemu-agent.sh file executable.

text
chmod +x /usr/local/etc/rc.d/qemu-agent.sh

Start the QEMU Guest Agent service.

text
service qemu-guest-agent start

Confirm the QEMU Guest Agent service is running.

text
service qemu-guest-agent status

# Output
qemu_guest_agent is running as pid 85066.

Proxmox

If you have not done so already, you need to enable the guest agent of the VM in Proxmox. Navigate to:

If you just enabled the QEMU Guest Agent, the final step is the reboot the VM. This is required to get the QEMU Guest Agent working with Proxmox.

Verify

Confirm that the VM's IP address information is available in the Proxmox console by browsing to:

Outro

In this post I showed you how to configure the QEMU Guest Agent on a pfSense firewall for use on a Proxmox hypervisor.