Install pfSense on VMware ESXI 7 (2021)

hey guys welcome to another take me out video thank you so much for being here i really appreciate each and every one of you today we are going to talk about installing pf sense and not only that we are going to install it as a virtual machine on an es6 i7 server and we are going to see how actually easy it is and i've heard throughout the years a lot of people that are almost afraid of doing it they don't understand how to connect it and how to configure it and how to make everything talk to each other and the really the secret behind installing pfsense virtualized as a virtual machine is to have an esxi server with more than one physical network adapter creating two new virtual switches creating two new virtual port groups on each individual a virtual switch and then create a virtual machine with two network interfaces and we will see how we can join the network interfaces together one for isp and one for lan power up the virtual machine install pfsense and start configuring it it's really that easy if you don't know pfsense i really think that you should at least do some research research about it it's an open source firewall but even though it's open source it doesn't fall short from any other well-known or commercial firewalls like fortinets and palo altos and checkpoints and i think that in a lot of ways it's even a lot more robust than a my unified dream machine pro for example pf sense was one of the first firewalls i really fell in love with i ran it myself virtualized for many years before switching to unified dream machine pro and i did it in spite of pf sense not because in what pf sense is i really feel that in some in some times i really want to go back to using pfsense so i really think that a pf sense is worth a little bit of your time i really recommend playing with it and see how tremendously powerful pfsense is so we'll jump to the computer we see how to configure the esxi servers before launching the install and we will see that actually there is really nothing to it so if you haven't done so already please subscribe subscribing really gives us the power and the influence to keep on creating new content please subscribe and hit the bell icon so you will be notified when new videos come out and let's jump over to the computer and see how this is done join me all right guys so we are at the computer and before we start installing pfsense and mount the iso and go through the installation wizard we need to make sure that our virtual infrastructure is all set up we have more than a more than one physical network interfaces in our es6 or es6i server sorry and now before we do anything else we need to make sure that the es6i server itself knows what to do with those physical network interfaces and we need to make sure that one interface is connected to our isp modem and the other to our network switch and then all our devices will be connected to that switch much like any other router on the market has one port that's dedicated to when and the others are for lan and they're labeled this way this is exactly what we are going to do with our esxi server we are going to create virtual switches assign network interfaces to them and then we are going to use them properly in our installation so let's go right ahead and dive into our virtual environment i am using vcenter a version seven and a two es6i hosts that are both esxi version 7 we are going to pick one of them and we are going to start our journey by going to the configure tab virtual switches right here and clicking on add networking what we're gonna what we wanna do is to create a new virtual interface and then assign a physical interface to it so this process starts by creating virtual machine port group for a standard switch click on next new standard switch click on next and we'll choose an adapter let's choose vm evmenik 0 for that matter and we'll click on next [Music] let's name this virtual switch so we'll know what it represents isp this will be the name of the port group [Music] and click on finish we'll need to repeat this process one more time i'm of course ignoring my all my current networking uh virtual adapters and virtual port groups i'm ignoring all that i'm creating a whole new environment that will be the isp right here and another one that will be let's call it our a new standard switch of course add our remaining virtual physical interface sorry and we'll name this sport group let's say in pf len alright so we'll know to identify it that's it our or let's say infrastructure preparation is ready and now we will be able to take a virtual machine of course create it assign two network interfaces to it one will be the when and one will be the land this is exactly the the kind of thing that we have enabled right now of course this is a lab environment i have nothing plugged in to this virtual interfaces we will of course use a another networking infrastructure but the process remains exactly the same this is what you will need to do in your environment so after we created the virtual interfaces and in the process new virtual port groups you will have of course to connect the isp to it to wherever it's connected and your network switch to the other interface and now we can go and create a new virtual machine of course let me step back you will need to download pfsense and this is a very basic googling work just searching pfsense going to the in to the website clicking on download click on the latest version the architecture will be amd 64-bit and the installer will be cd image iso this is what we want to import into our esxi data store so we will have so you have the option to mount it into our virtual dvd drive that's of course a basic setup i'm not going to elaborate on that it's really just downloading an iso that's all there is to it i've already done it so i don't want to waste time on that let's go and create a new virtual machine click on next let's give it a name [Music] sorry pf sense that's great let's give it a a datastore to live on [Music] and now we need to choose other in the o os family and we need to choose freebsd 11 64-bit that's what works for me and now here is something that i i noticed a lot of people having trouble with creating the virtual machine i'm gonna give it two cpu and two gigabytes of memory i always used to give it 16 gigabytes of hard drive and i'm always using thin provisioning and now in the network area the first thing we i we need to do is to add a network adapter we have two network adapters one is isp and one is lan so i'm going to assume this network interface will be my isp uplink so i'm going to choose isp right here and my lan interface i'm going to assign it with a pf len we gave it before so now i have two network interfaces all i have to now to do now is to mount the iso [Music] all right great don't forget to tick this check box or otherwise it's it's as if we didn't mount the iso and we're ready to click on next right before i go to the next step i want to make sure we all understand what we did so far we took an esxi server with more than one physical network interface we've created a new virtual switch for each one of those virtual of these physical interfaces sorry and then we created a port group for each of the new virtual switches one is isp one is lan that's all we did up until this this moment we've created a new virtual machine with two network interfaces one is for the new isp port group and one connected to the new lan port group and now we're ready to power on the virtual machine we'll click on finish we'll click on power on and we will launch the installation wizard now this is what you were you're probably going to see in your screen i'm going to i'm going to have to cheat in this in this video because i really don't have anything connected to the physical suite to the physical network interfaces that we just configured so after the installation finishes i am going to connect this virtual machine to my virtual to sorry to my existing network infrastructure but the process remains the same exactly so we'll click accept we'll click on install we'll click on enter for me at least i'm using ufs enter the installation process is starting almost zero complex networking in configurations of course once the installation is finished and we have the network infrastructure up and running then pf sense is very robust and a lot of advanced configuration can be done we will of course dive into it way way later maybe in this video maybe in future videos but for now as you see the installation process is very very straightforward and now i'm clicking on no i don't want to do any manual configurations something is probably something happened i don't know why but as you can see even even in this process even if you would just go and do a hard reboot it would be just fine and now pf sense is finished the installation sorry [Music] and the first boot can take some time because until it identifies the dhcp if if it's already connected to a network it pulls all the network information and it can take i don't know two even five minutes and our interfaces are not connected to and not connected to anything so we took a little less time but this is the next step of our process that we want to a set of vlans i'm going to click on no and now we need to choose which interface is connected to our isp and which interface is connected to our lan and what pf sense is asking us right now is which of your interfaces is connected to the when and all we see in this screen is the name of the virtual interfaces and it's vmx0 and vmx1 they're mac addresses and we don't really have their names we don't see isp or pflan and we need to to decide based on the mac address which is which so what we are going to do we are going to switch back to our vcenter server go into the virtual machine and actually we can see it even here i think yeah the isp network interface i can say that it ends with a2 so the network interface that ends with a2 is vmx0 that's great that means that actually i don't need to change anything i'm going to type vmx0 and which is connected to our land that's the next question next question there's no other choice vmx1 sorry vmx1 that's correct and now tfsense is going to do its thing and configure things based on our on our configurations this also can take from anywhere from two three minutes to even five six and ten minutes so i'm going to pause the recording right here and i'm going to resume it once this step is done all right guys so the initial configuration of pf senses is finished i actually had to cheat during this pause and connect the when interface into one of my real live villains in my home lab and this is what you see in the when the ip address is an internal address it's not really connected to an isp it's as if the pf sense is one of my network clients connected to any one of my switches so in order to get things going what i like to do is click on the on two in this menu that you see right here it's set interface ip addresses because i want i want to set the lan ip address to something like 10 dot 100.100.1 that's the the subnet i want to use internally with my pf sense and i want to use a 24-bit subnet mask click on enter click on enter and now pearson's asked me if i want to turn on dhcp server actually i will turn it on the start address i always leave a few addresses in the beginning of the subnet and a few at the end so my beginning address will be 10.100.100.10 and the end of the range will be 10.100.100.1 200 for that matter let's click on yes that's great so now as long as we have a virtual machine right now connected to our pflan port group that we've created we will go to 10.100.100.1 and we'll get the pf sense a web interface if you don't believe me let's see i have this test a virtual machine i always use for several purposes sorry let's refresh oh it's on it's on a different in on a different esxi server i'm going to pause the recording right now i'm going to migrate this virtual machine to the esxi server that has the new virtual switches and that we've just created and then i'm going to connect it to the pf lan and we'll see that everything is working again we can start configuring in pf sense join me in in a second all right so the virtual machine was v-motioned to the esxi server that we've configured and now we are ready to connect it to the pf lan port group let's open up a remote console to this virtual machine all right let's open a new browser window all right so we have a new browser window we can now safely go to 10.100.100.1 and voila we are the pf sense a web interface and if i recall correctly the username is admin and the password is pfsense by default that's correct let's go ahead and click on next click on next hostname if you don't if you want to change it that's fine local domain again i'm always in my production environments i do change the hostname and domain but for now we can not bother with it let's give it dns servers i don't want in the dns servers to be overwritten by my isps dns servers i like google and the cloud flare better let's say the time zone if it's relevant if not click on next now it's asking us how do we connect to the internet in this specific case it's dhcp if you have for exa for example dsl connection you will click on ppa ppoe and supply your username and password for us dhcp dhcp is great click on next lan ip address that's what we've configured that's fine and now we need to change the admin password let's change it click on reload and that's it pfsense is now it's installed it's configured it's it's alive because we just we're just looking at its a user interface and now all we have to do is to start configuring it and create firewall rules and create vlans and of course these are all topics that are that we will touch and we will configure but for now just to make sure let's do a small sanity check let's open up a command prompt prompt and let's try to pin 8.8.8 that's great we have we have a connection let's see that are also resolving let's pin www.google.com oh a fat fingerlit and as we can see our connection is up we we are truly and physically connected to the internet on the one side on the isp on the second side on our lan and this is exactly what we what we'll need to do let's click on firewall rules just to see in this section of course on what we're interested in is is the lan the default rules or the ones that allow traffic to go out for example to get to get internet connectivity when we'll dive deeper into how to configure epfsense we will have many vlans right here so we will have a lot of firewall rules but this is the first step the very first step on how to configure how to configure pfsense on an esxi environment all right so the last step that i consider to be part of the installation process or at least post installation process we are running this pf sense instance is a vmware virtual machine and as a vmware virtual machine it needs vmware tools in order to communicate with the host and the way we install vmware tools in pf sense is we go to system and package manager and we go to the available packages tab and you can even sort this by searching for tools and install open vm tools click on install [Music] we will let the installation complete it's a really fast and stamp installation actually it's already done and if we go back to our vcenter server we will see that vmware tools are already running but what i like to do whenever i install vmware tools i just close this window close this virtual machine window event and give the pf sense virtual machine not the windows 10 virtual machine but the pf sense virtual machine i give it a quick reboot and then at least for me in my opinion the installation process is complete and now we can move to the configuration vlans snort firewall rules port forwarding etc etc now we are really done with the installation so guys if you haven't done so already please subscribe and hit the bell icon so you will be notified when new videos come out click the like button and of course i want to hear your feedbacks your comments let me know in the comment section below if i did something wrong maybe i forgot something maybe you have another way to do things maybe better please let me know in the comment section i would love to hear your feedback and until next time please go ahead start up your esxi server install pfsense i've used it for many years i love it before switching to a to unify a dream machine pro i urge you take a chance try pf sense you will not be sorry join me again in the next video bye [Music] you

Channel: Tech Me Out

Views: 8,648

Keywords: Install pfSense on VMware ESXI 7, pfsense, vmware, esxi, pfsense setup, how to install pfsense, pfsense installation and configuration, pfsense firewall, install pfsense, pfsense install, vsphere, virtual machine, firewall, home lab, firewall pfsense, pfsense vmware, vswitch, vmnic, macos, pfsense router, pfsense esxi 6, btnhd, bjtechnewshd, pfsense tutorial, pfsense (software), esxi 7.0, vsphere 7.0, install pfsense on vmware esxi, homelab, networking, virtual firewall, virtual, wan, lan

Id: UCLWSAc3QrY

Length: 26min 10sec (1570 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 10 2021