Pfsense "playground" testing environment

[benjsing]

hi,

i am a beginner when it comes to pfsense. well, i have been using it for a while now, but pretty basic configuration.

now i'd like to play around with settings a bit (kind of a learning by doing attempt). however, i would prefer not to do this with my actual working pfsense setup (on APU), but rather in a testing environment.

what is the best way to do so? i am using a macbook pro (2,5ghz i7 / 16 gb ram), so virtualbox was the first thing that came to mind. however, when running 2 virtual boxes parallel with my regular os (one for pfsense, the other one lubuntu as a client), things don't exactly run smoothly. seems like i cannot use the macbook itself as a client to the virtualbox pfsense - or i am not finding the correct configuration.

is there a clean and simple way to emulate a testing environment? i do have some spare hardware parts (several raspberry pis, old fritz boxes). what do you guys recommend? sorry if this is a total noob question. like i said, i need to learn more about this subject and thus am looking for a way to do so without messing with my working configuration ^^

thanks and best regards

[KOM]

Run Virtualbox with 2 VM's, one for pfSense and one for your Lubuntu client.  I just talked about this exact same scenario in this thread.