How to Install pfSense on VirtualBox – Step by Step

[Music] hi everyone welcome back to Zach deck today we have an exciting tutorial for you we're going to walk you through the step-by-step process of installing pfSense a powerful open-source firewall and routing platform on Virtual box this will allow you to create a virtualized network environment for testing and experimentation purposes before we dive in if you find this video helpful don't forget to hit hit that like button and if you're new here consider subscribing for more Tech tutorials like this one all right let's get started the first step is to download the pfSense ISO image from the official website open your web browser and go to the pfSense official website before we do that let us download and install virtual box if you already have virtual box skip this step since I will be installing the virtual box on a Windows machine I will select Windows host let us now install the virtual box on our system just follow the onscreen instructions to install the application the virtual box is now installed let us now download the PF sense ISO image here you'll find various versions of pfSense choose the version that suits your needs we recommend the amd64 version for most users on the installer select DVD image choose a mirror closest to your location for faster downloads once downloaded make sure you have seven zip installed or any other file archiver for compressing and uncompressing files seems I don't have 7zip installed let me download and install it 7zip is a free and open source file archiver now that szip is installed just right click on the pfSense ISO image and extract it now that we have virtual box in the pfSense ISO let's set up a new virtual machine open Virtual box and click on the new button give your virtual machine and name like PF sends next select the PF sense ISO image you downloaded earlier choose BSD as the type and free BSD as the version choose the 64-bit version pfSense is an open- Source firewall and routing platform based on FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open source Unix like operating system allocate at least one gab of ram but the more memory the better you can allocate more than one CPU but for now I will stick to one CPU you can change these settings later if you want more processing power let me increase the memory to at least 4 GB since I have 8 GB on the host machine next we need to set up the virtual hard disk 10 GB is sufficient for pfSense I plan to install a lot of packages so I will choose more when done click on finish having multiple network interfaces will be beneficial for our firewall installation among these interfaces one will be designated as our W interface ensuring a functional internet connection click on the network tab to set up network interfaces adapter 1 will be our W adapter adapter 2 will be our LAN adapter and adapter 3 will be our DMZ virtual machines set to operate in Virtual boxes internal Network Mode are linked to an isolated virtual Network within this network these virtual machines can communicate with one another but they are unable to establish connections with the virtual box host machine or any other hosts in physical or external networks we are now prepared to install pfSense on Virtual box to begin select your pfSense virtual machine and click on the start button the virtual machine is now starting so you can begin the installation press enter to accept the copyright and distribution notice on this screen press enter to install pfSense just press enter here to proceed to the next screen even on this screen leave everything at the default and press enter next we choose stripe as we're installing pfSense on a single dis press the space bar to select the virtual box hard dis and then press enter use the Tab Key to select yes then press enter the installation process will start it will take a bit of time so be patient now it's crucial to remove the ISO file from virtual box before rebooting failing to do so will lead us back to the initial steps of the installation process press enter to reboot the virtual machine just ignore these arrows and reset the virtual machine pfSense will now initiate its first boot it should automatically identify the network adapter assigned to n adapter 1 as the WAN interface and the remaining two adapters will be recognized as the Lan and DMZ or opt interfaces DHCP is enabled by default on the Lan interface and the default IP range is in the 192.168.1 now to configure the pfSense we need to install another virtual machine the new virtual machine should also be in the internal Network to connect to the landan part of the PF sense you can create a Windows 10 or 11 virtual machine or any light Linux machine of your choice since I have an auntu ISO image will create an auntu virtual machine this is how the network is like we'll install auntu as pc1 we'll later add a Windows machine as PC2 and a server in the DMZ let me now install the auntu virtual machine a virtual machine is now installed let me change the adapter to internal so I connect to the PF sense SL let us check the IP address it has picked up it has the IP address assigned by virtual box let me change the adapter from that to internal when we change adapter settings to internal the Ubuntu virtual box will now be connected to the Land network of the pfSense let us now check the IP address it has picked up as you can see it has picked up the IP address from the pfSense DHCP server in the 192 range let us now open a browser and connect to the pfSense dashboard before we do that let me first try to Ping the Lan interface of pfSense as you can see I can reach the Lan interface of PF sense you will get a certificate error since we have not installed a certificate we'll show you in another video how to install a certificate login with the default credentials admin is their username and pfSense is the password pfSense should be in small letters even the username admin run through the initial configuration wizard to finish the installation and configuration of PF sents and that's it for the installation part check out the video in the description on how to do basic configurations on pfSense and there you have it we've successfully walked through the step-by-step process of installing pfSense on Virtual box if you found this tutorial helpful be sure to give it a thumbs up and consider subscribing for more Tech tutorials like this one thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: ZacsTech

Views: 10,682

Keywords: How To Install PFSense Firewall in VirtualBox, how to setup pfsense firewall in virtualbox, pfsense virtualbox, pfsense virtualbox internal network, how to install pfsense on virtualbox mac, pfsense virtualbox network adapters pfsense virtualbox image, installing pfsense, pfsense box, netgate, windows 11, windows 10

Id: LX-Y-99zJ3M

Length: 11min 55sec (715 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 06 2023