FreeBSD and Persistent Network Interface Names in VMware

Why vmx0, vmx1, vmx2 interface names sometimes cause fear?

Anyone running FreeBSD as a router or firewall in a virtualized environment knows this situation well: network interfaces are named vmx0, vmx1, vmx2, and critical configuration (pf, routing, jails) depends on them. A small change can suddenly turn WAN into LAN and LAN into DMZ.

On physical hardware this is a common problem. Adding a PCI card can change device enumeration order. In VMware, the situation is much better, but it is still important to understand how to make interface naming stable and future-proof. 

Using iperf3 and Prometheus for WAN link monitoring

I have multiple FreeBSD routers across my environments across the world each having its own WAN (Internet) connectivity and using WireGuard VPN to connect all into a private network. 

I would like to do

• local monitoring of Internet connectivity on each router
• centralized monitoring of Internet connectivity of each router in my datacenter 

The solution is pretty simple and I will describe it on this blog post.

FreeBSD High-Performance Network Stack Tuning Guide

The default FreeBSD configuration is optimized for compatibility, not maximum network throughput. This becomes visible especially during iperf testing, routing benchmarks, or high-traffic workloads where mbuf exhaustion or CPU bottlenecks can occur. Let's discuss various turnings.

ZFS - Storage Provisioning

ZFS (Zettabyte File System) is a combined filesystem and volume manager, originally developed by Sun Microsystems for Solaris and now widely used on FreeBSD and other Unix-like systems.

In this blog post, we will describe ZFS and examples how to use it.

MinIO on FreeBSD

MinIO is a high-performance, S3-compatible object storage platform designed for scalability, resilience, and simplicity in modern cloud-native environments. Its lightweight architecture and impressive throughput make it a popular choice for both on-premises and hybrid deployments, especially when building distributed storage clusters. In this post, I’ll briefly introduce MinIO and then walk through the test environment of a six-node MinIO cluster, exploring how it behaves, performs, and scales in a real-world lab setup.

This test environment is part of potential 1 PB+ S3 Storage system. The conceptual design  of system is depicted below.

Conceptual Design - S3 Object Storage

Proof of Concept is always good idea before the final system is professionally designed. In this blog post I described the first ultra small virtualized environment to test MinIO concept.