PfSense as VM in vSphere Hypervisor ESXi 6.5: no connection to WAN gateway

Jl 0

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

WAN has WanVs as Virtual switch
LAN has LanVs as Virtual switch
only pFsenseVM is connected to both WAN and LAN
all the VMi are connected to LAN
LAN has no connection to any switch
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 configured

LAN
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 192.168.1.254

on 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:

ping to Host successful (command: ping 20.30.40.50)
ping to WAN gateway unsuccessful (command: ping 20.30.40.1 output: ping: sendto: Host is down)
ping to pFsenseVM successful (command: ping 192.168.1.1)
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:

ping to pFsenseVM successful (command: ping 192.168.1.1)
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