Virtual pfSense Appliance on VMWare Host

I am having some issues setting up the WAN side of pfSense.

I have ordered a dedicated box through a hosting service with ESXi loaded on it. Along with that I have 3 public IP addresses that will ultimately be going to the box. Currently one of the IPs is set straight to the box and I can access VMware through the client by using that address. The dedicated box has only one NIC going to it.

I have used this post as a model for the network setup. I currently have pfSense installed and running. My local network is functioning and I can access the web configuration GUI. However I can't get outbound. I can't figure out how I want to configure my WAN in this situation.

I tried setting the WAN to my access IP but it must have caused an error somewhere as I can no longer connect to my VM Host. I am having the IP reset, but not sure where to go from here.


Solution 1:

I needed to run a router on my ESXi host as well. I also could not get outbound. I found that the traffic I needed to traverse the external interface was being blocked because ESXi defaults all network cards to "Promiscuous: Reject". Set your promiscuous setting to accept, and the adapter should start flowing the traffic properly. You can find this setting in the "Fat Client" under Configuration -> Network, and click Properties for the network in question.

Bon Chance!