After running for the last week I haven't had any issues with not having a failover DHCP server defined.

Each firewall takes over their duties as expected when their partner isn't available.

I would like to get some final confirmation though; if anyone has been through this (CARP + DHCP server failover) please tell me if my setup seems strange.

Yes, you can use a CARP address as the IPSec endpoint. There is an option to sync IPSec configuration in the XMLRPC Sync options on the HA Sync page.

Sorry. I have no idea what you are even asking.

The basic things that need to be changed to run pfSense HA in VMware ESXi are described here:

https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/highavailability/troubleshooting-high-availability-clusters.html?highlight=esxi#hypervisor-users-especially-vmware-esx-esxi

@teamits yeah. It should just work. It doesn't tho... And it's really messing up my holiday giving spirit.

I should've just did it all myself. No outside vendor. Sigh.

i've solved the problem. its very similar to bridge behavior i encountered in another installation. I only have vlans defined for my LAGG. once i created another interface that would be untagged on the LAGG, it picked up my native vlan as expected. all of the VIPs for the tagged interfaces started working.

so just for my own curiosity i deleted the native interface i crated and rebooted. everything still works. all in all i must have just jiggled the handle