Indeed, only 1 VLAN ID can be associated to untagged traffic on each port…
Yes, with VMWare you have a number of virtual switches and you can add a number of virtual nics to your VM guests. The numbers and features available depend on the edition/version/host type you're using.
Now if you could bridge one "port" of this virtual switch to a real NIC, and connect as many virtual NIC's to this virtual switch as you want to get DHCP leases.
Yes, that's what I'm doing. In my setup, on the pfSense VM guest, I bridge 1 virtual nic to my main LAN VLAN, and the other 3 to the VLAN connected to the cable modem (all 3 to the same VLAN) - see attached screenshots. Inside pfSense, I see 4 adapters, everything is working. I was just trying to migrate it to a physical setup due to performance issues on this specific VMWare Host…
(Does the 4 NIC limit still exist?)
Yes, but it is going up to 10 on the next version (I think it's already up to 10 in the latest WS). With VMWare Server 1.x on a Windows host, you get 10 "Unmanaged Virtual Switches/Networks" - out of which 3 are used by VMWare, effectively leaving you with 7 in most setups. VMWS 1.x guests are limited to 4 virtual nics, but VMWS 2.0 will allow 10 nics (but I think it's still limited in the number of networks). VMWS under Linux already supports more networks (100?) and I believe more nics.
[image: VirtualLans.jpg]
[image: VirtualLans.jpg_thumb]
[image: VirtualNics.jpg]
[image: VirtualNics.jpg_thumb]
[image: InterfaceAssignments.jpg]
[image: InterfaceAssignments.jpg_thumb]