Cannot PING or access web interface for pfSense on ESXi

[Mothman]

Hey guys,
I recently started a virtual home environment. I installed pfSense on ESXi, but despite assigning the interfaces and configuring the IPs, I cannot PING the pfsense nor can I access the web interface. The strange thing is that in the console for the pfsense I can ping out to my host.

[Gertjan]

@Mothman said in Cannot PING or access web interface for pfSense on ESXi:

ESXi

Hi,

What you mean to say is : this : https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/virtualization/virtualizing-pfsense-with-vmware-vsphere-esxi.html doesn't work any more ?

[Mothman]

@Gertjan
I discovered that the steps work just fine if your OS is ESXi, i was running a VM and that's why I ran into problems.

[biggsy]

@Mothman

There was/is a problem with the ESXi Host Client where it automatically set Pass-through (Direct-path I/O) to Yes. You might want to check that. It caused me a lot of trouble and the only way I found to work around it was to use E1000 instead of VMXnet.

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2145889

[Mothman]

I was able to find the solution!
Because I was running a VM of ESXi and running pfSense within that VM, I had to switch the LAN and WAN interfaces as-well as augment the default IP of the LAN by 1 (192.168.1.2) because 192.168.1.1 was being used by VMware. All of these configurations were done within the pfSense console provided by the web interface from my virtual ESXi.
Once I switched the interfaces and IP, I was able to ping and access the web interface of a pfSense VM loaded within an ESXi VM!