PfSense as VM in vSphere Hypervisor ESXi 6.5: no connection to WAN gateway
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Hello to everybody
I am no well confident with networking, but I need to solve a problem. This is the scenario:
I installed VSphere ESXi 6.5 Hypervisor on a server machine connected to a LAN; then, from the VSphere ESXi 6.5 Hypervisor Interface, I set up the following addresses (Host, Gateway, DNS IPs are voluntarily changed)
| Host IP | 20.30.40.50 |
| Netmask | 255.255.255.0 |
| Gateway IP | 20.30.40.1 |
| DNS1 IP | 40.50.60.70 |
| DNS2 IP | 40.25.60.70 |the connection tested by the ESXi Hypervisor interface directly on the server works fine (all of Host, Gateway, DNS1 and DNS IP's are successfully pinged).
Then I registered five virtual machines on the Host (VM1 -> VM5), all connected using NAT; since VSphere ESXi 6.5 does not have a native NAT configuration, I googled and found that pfSense can do that; so I installed pFSense as a virtual machine (named pFsenseVM), then, according to the official documentation, I created two virtual switches WanVs and LanVs and two Port Groups WAN and LAN where
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WAN has WanVs as Virtual switch
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LAN has LanVs as Virtual switch
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only pFsenseVM is connected to both WAN and LAN
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all the VMi are connected to LAN
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LAN has no connection to any switch
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Management network having Host machine, is connected to the phisical adapter (there is one physical adapter only on the server)
I started pFsenseVM and after booting, I set both WAN and LAN IP addresses in the following way (using pFSense terminal):
WAN
IPv4 address: 20.30.40.50
netmask (IPv4 subnet bit count): 255.255.255.0 (24)
Gateway IPv4 address: 20.30.40.1
No IPv6 configuredLAN
IPv4 address: 192.168.1.1
No gateway set
DHCP enabled
Start IP address client range: 192.168.1.3
End IP address client range 192.168.1.254on saving all these settings, no error message were displayed and could successfully access the WebConfigurator typing http://192.168.1.1 in the URL of a web browser.
Then I did some test connection by pFsense shell, getting the following results:
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ping to Host successful (command: ping 20.30.40.50)
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ping to WAN gateway unsuccessful (command: ping 20.30.40.1 output: ping: sendto: Host is down)
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ping to pFsenseVM successful (command: ping 192.168.1.1)
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ping to VM1 (Linux Mint 17.3 64 bit with static IP 192.168.1.3, netmask: 255.255.255.0, gateway 192.168.1.1, automatic DNS) successful (command: ping 192.168.1.3)
The following outputs, running commands by the terminal of VM1 (static IP: 192.168.1.3), were returned:
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ping to pFsenseVM successful (command: ping 192.168.1.1)
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ping to Host successful (command: ping 20.30.40.50)
From each virtual machine VMi I cannot go to Internet.
I see it is up to the connection failure to WAN gateway, but what am I missing?
Thanks to anyone could help me
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