ESXi, pfsense & vlan-ning
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Current Setup:
ESXi 5.1 box with 2 physical NIC's
pfSense 2.0.2 running as a virtual machine on the ESXi box
–1 NIC/vswitch connected to cable modem (WAN)
--1 NIC/vswitch connected to HP 1810G (LAN)
--I will be receiving 2 more NIC's for this server next week
I have various other virtual machines running on the ESXi box and they all use the LAN vswitch.Right now the HP 1810G is working just as an unmanaged switch, but I would like to start playing around with VLAN's.
So what is the best strategy to setup a flexible VLAN environment?
Reading about it, sounds like VST mode (virtual switch VLAN) tagging is the most flexible way to go. I am assuming I would team up the 2 new NIC (or maybe even 3, if I can use the current LAN NIC) and setup the various vlans on the ESXi.
Do I still need to setup the same vlan's inside the pfsense & 1810G? I can still assign the various ports on the 1810G to different vlan's, right?
Am I on the right track or is there a better way to go about this.Thank you in advance for your help -- this vlan stuff is a new world to me. :-)
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The way I normally do this is to setup VLAN networks in ESX and then create a nic for pfsense in that new vswitch. This keeps pfsense from having to do any VLAN work on top of what ESX is doing.