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Problem understanding how to get physical machine to go through virtual pfsense

Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Virtualization
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  • H
    h311m4n
    last edited by Mar 29, 2014, 5:47 PM Mar 29, 2014, 5:45 PM

    Hello everyone,

    First of all, sorry if this is a newb question, I've searched on the net but couldn't seem to find a simple answer to my "simple" problem.

    Essentially, the situation is as follows:

    • A cable goes from my cable/ISP router (192.168.1.1) to my ESXi (192.168.1.20) on what I configured as the WAN interface. The ESXi host has a second nic for LAN

    • pFsense (192.168.1.2) in on ESXi host with 2 virtual nics (WAN and LAN) as described in the pFense tutorial

    • I have no issues creating rules for virtual machines and even another physical machine (PC1) that is also connected to the cable/ISP router, they all have pFsense (192.168.1.2) configured as their default gateway

    However, from the LAN nic on the ESX host, I'm going to a small switch to which another physical machine (PC2) is connected. I am unable to get PC2 to ping my lan or the internet.

    I'm pretty sure I "know" what the problem is (my guess being that a virtual pFsense has 2 virtual nics configured, it needs a 3rd one to understand that what is on the physical LAN nic is actually LAN too!).

    Can someone shed some light? I'm not sure I'm being very clear with my description so please do not hesitate to tell!

    Thanks!

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    • J
      johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
      last edited by Mar 31, 2014, 7:52 PM

      Your pfsense wan network is the same as the pfsense lan network??  That shouldn't be working at all to be honest.. if you wan network is 192.168.1.0/24 then lan should be say 192.168.2.0/24

      As to connecting your lan of pfsense to your physical network.. Yeah that is how you would do it.  Can you post up your esxi network.. example here is mine minus seeing the dmz vswitch which is not tied to physical network at all.

      So my pfsense wan is public IP from ISP, that physical interface is directly connected to cable modem.

      lan is 192.168.1.0/24 and connected to my physical switch and all devices on my lan that are on 192.168.1.0/24 and use pfsense vm interface at 192.168.1.253 for their gateway.

      wlan is connected to my wireless APs

      I have broken out my vmkern portgroup to be on its own switch and connected to its own physical interface - just because I had the extra physical nic to play with on the esxi box, and breaking out makes it perform a bit better when moving files to and from the datastore.  This physical nic is connected to the same physical switch the lan nic is connected too.

      Post up your esxi networking setup and will fix you right up - but you have the same network on pfsense wan as you do lan – which is not correct to start with.

      example-esxi.png
      example-esxi.png_thumb

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