Hi guys,
I know, I know, don’t virtualize pfsense… I know.
But, as a backup solution to my bare metal PC running pfsense, I spun up a VM under proxmox so I could take down the main appliance for some hardware changes. I got it all installed, loaded my XML, and immediately was prompted to sort out all my interfaces… Bare Metal box has em_ enumerations, whereas the virtual instance has bce_.
I passed a quad NIC through via proxmox to the VM, but the NIC’s are not the same type, the one in the proxmox machine is broadcom whereas I believe the one in my main box is Intel, or at least a Dell or HP branded Intel card (I think?).
Is this what results in this naming difference? Is there a way to force them to have the same names as it would make my “archaic” manual failover option much more simplistic.
Can’t say I’ve had any issues with my virtualized pfSense instances. I’m pretty sure if your original pfSense was virtual you wouldn’t have this issue. 
Well, the original wasn’t virtual, but the virtual one does have a quad NIC passed through via IOMMU, so theoretically, it “shouldn’t” know the difference. But I am not sure why the interface names are different, it makes the config copy difficult…
I understand. I just thought it was funny that you said we shouldn’t virtualize pfSense, but in this case if you had your deploying of an existing config likely would have be uneventful.
Maybe if you deploy the config in sections via the command line you can deal with the renaming of the interfaces and then deploy the ACLs/etc to them.
I was able to relatively easily edit the interfaces before it rebooted - it forced me to. But I think pfblocker and a few other plugins didn’t have a fun time of it. I wonder if it would be as easy as opening up the XML and doing a simple find and replace.