Deploy pfSense VMware vSphere as a virtual machine step-by-step

The open source firewall solution known as pfSense is a very popular solution to deploy in the home lab or even for enterprise use. It contains many great features that allow meeting the challenges and needs of many enterprise customers and home lab use cases.

Running pfSense as a virtual machine is a great way to take advantage of the solution without a dedicated appliance to run pfSense. It allows simply running your pfSense firewall solution as a virtual machine along with your other workloads in the environment.

In this Deploy pfSense VMware vSphere walkthrough, we will see how you can easily install pfSense in a VMware vSphere virtual machine. In general, the steps will also work for a VMware Workstation installation.



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Introduction - 0:00
Downloading the pfSense installation ISO - 0:45
Uploading the ISO to your VMware vSphere datastore - 2:04
Creating the VMware vSphere virtual machine to house pfSense - 2:51
Customizing the virtual machine hardware for pfSense - 4:05
Add a new network adapter to the VM for WAN/LAN - 5:01
Changing the storage controller for pfSense - 6:00
Configuring the ISO for booting the pfSense virtual machine - 6:40
Powering on the pfSense virtual machine - 7:30
Beginning the installation of pfSense - 7:45
Rebooting the pfSense VM - 8:35
Starting the text-based initial configuration - 8:55
Configuring VLANs - 9:25
Selecting the WAN interface - 9:45
Selecting the LAN interface - 10:00
Initial configuration is complete, IPs are configured - 10:20
Logging into the WebConfigurator wizard - 10:58
Beginning the WebConfigurator wizard and configuring options - 11:25
WAN connection configuration - 12:15
LAN connection configuration - 12:35
Initial configuration reloaded and finishing the WebConfigurator -13:00
Logging into the dashboard for the first time and adding widgets - 13:15
Adding the Traffic graph to the pfSense dashboard - 13:40
Concluding thoughts and wrap up - 14:20

Take a look at my detailed blog post on how to deploy pfSense VMware:


Running a virtual firewall vs a physical firewall:

[jhon.k.]

Hello, I'm new in virtualization, do you have a video about those network adapters you showed at 5:35, I would be grateful for a help.

[raufi.s]

Wow, After watching this video you 100% motivated me to like the vid and subscribe to your channel. Thank you for such nice videos. 👍

[MO]

Great work, thank you. Would like to ask your opinion on the security side of this, since the WAN port running on ESXi is exposed directly to the internet. have you had any security problems? Are you running this for production? I see some comments round the internet saying dont virtualise the firewall, but if you have not had any issues, i will probably take the plunge and start using a virtualised firewall. I am just concerned for the security side of it. TIA

[vatsalmehta]

Thanks for the detailed video. Can you share the exact topology and details of th "Internet" port group please ?

[EldhoseMathew-yrsx]

Hi, Thank you for this video, were you able to install the VMware tools on this virtual machine ? and also is it possible to do the configurations which you have done over UI through commands or script ?

[ncrr]

Is there anyway to get this up and running without having to select the WAN/LAN right now? I'm running a Ubiquiti USG Pro-4 for a router/firewall. I would like to be able to setup pfSense first before removing the Pro-4.

[getoutmore]

Is there a video on how you setup the "Internet" Network adapter? Coming from Proxmox this confuses me..

[mambsandhu]

Thanks for the video.
Doubt: When and where did you mention the LAN IP address ?

[sunnylm]

Hi, i'm abit aconfuse here, if i setup nested ESXI should I be install pfsense on the main vmhost rather than inside vcenter on the vitual host? i coun't figure it out how to setup vSwitch to test vlan etc...

[crvsys]

How do I add the other VMs in my vSphere 7 lab to use the pfsense WAN I created?If you can do A video on that I would be greatful. Awesome Job!

[dylanhaugen]

I've been racking brain over this for a couple of days now, I don't even know if I need pfsense for my problem. I'm running an esxi host on my home network. I have some virtual machines that need to communicate with the internet, and I have other virtual machines that I want to only communicate with physical machines on my LAN. I have one NIC on my system now (using an old desktop) and I'm pending a second NIC in the mail.

My thoughts are that I'll create two separate virtual switches, SW1 with NIC1 for Internet traffic and SW2 with NIC2 for LAN traffic. With this setup, both NICs will still be facing the internet via my router though, right? Should I use NAT on pfsense to route SW1 to the internet and route SW2 to my LAN?

If you could please share your thoughts, that would be greatly appreciated. Starting my home lab has proven to me that I don't know as much as I thought I did about networking/virtualization.

[keithsauer]

This is great but I was hoping to see if it’s worth jumping through hoops and enabling SR-IOV on the nic with the wan port (or even LAN). Not sure if it makes any performance difference. I’m not experiencing any issues with my 300/30mbps cable connection.

[ricobelgin]

I have a few questions. I am using a simple ESXi install without VCenter. I have a mini-PC with 6 X 2.5Gbit ports. One port will be the WAN port. One will be for management, which leaves 4 ports left. How would you configure your VSwitches and port groups? I would like to emulate the bridging feature that bare metal PFSense has by ganging multiple ports as a switch with a shared IP address. Is this possible? I am also thinking about using one port as a backup subnet and maybe using one as a heartbeat network if I choose to make have this managed by a VCenter.

[Yolorub_vids]

Is it possible to connect another vm with windows 10 for example to the router via LAN

[techhypero]

Hello, nice video, I am planning to play with pfSense also. Can you make a more in depth video about how to use pfSense to segment your vmware network ?

[andrewkamoha]

Is it possible to route all the traffic of a host desktop to a pfSense guest VM ???

[ripaire]

hi sir can you please make a tutorial about how we can use one machine to virtualiz pfsense and ubuntu server, and let the ubuntu server get an ip from pfsense and he can reach the internet if this senario is possible, thanks again .

[VictorEstrada]

You missed the most important part, the vSwitch and dpg config