All of these questions have been answered in more detail if you search the forum. The hardware you have described should be plenty powerful.  Search the forum for more on hardware sizing, try the hardware forum. I would replace your current router and have the pfsense box be your only NAT and firewall.  Will simplify things. Almost any network card will do, but see the HCL on www.pfsense.org and know that Intel cards are the best, and Realtek cards are the worst.

Yes.  However doing that in a virtual host doesn't give you isolation - just take a look at the security advisories that VMWare (and others) issue.  Virtualisation doesn't add security, it adds another very complex piece of software with it's own vulnerabilities to the mix, reducing security.  Better to use multiple real hosts, or one single host with many interfaces.

Ok, Thanks.

IPsec is a VPN.  The "point" you see for having pfSense an IPsec endpoint applies equally to OpenVPN, PPTP and other VPN technologies.

Ok, so I tried 1.2.2 and it didn't work for me. Now, I'm running 1.2.3-RC1 and it finally works. FYI. Thanks, Julian

Thank you, that answer very helpfull

@submicron: Or if you have multiple public IP addresses, you can use 1:1 NAT. Dear submicron, i have public IP from my ISP is 203.xxx.xxx.xxx/29, there is 6 public IP i can use for my server. How can i use this ?? Do you have 1:1 NAT tutorial / example for me..?? regards ??

If the hardware were under a high interrupt load, that could affect ping or even high cpu usage. It would take more information as to what your box is doing during these instances where ping times fluctuate.

Then pfSense is probably not for you.  There is no centralized management system for pfSense and the webGUI is the way to administer the system.

See the blog concerning NanoBSD builds.

Thank you. I try Skype  and it's works… InternetCalls has not UPnP into connection settings. Perhaps I have some configuration's problems into my pfSense pc... Into Traffic Graph I see that I have traffic only on LAN interface but no traffic by WAN interf. pfSense is a member of a Net that has a router and both pfSense's connections are into the LAN but the router (gateway) is signed for wan interface .. it's very strange becouse the internet navigation for the client works fine.

Again: Do you own a public to you routed subnet? Can you elaborate how traffic to you comes for this public IP? Depending on this you can/have to router or brigde.