January 22, 20206 yr Forgive the (maybe stupid) question.... My mb has two NICs..... so ithought I'd give pfsense in a VM a go and so I watched all the videos etc... But they all seem to deal with add in NIC cards rather than utilising what I already have.... My confusion is that, if I stub through my NICs to the VM, am I not denying the use of them to my bare metal server whilst it does its primary job of being my NAS? So, is it even possible to have a VM pfsense running as well as my server? If so, how do I arrange the two NICs? Thanks in advance
January 22, 20206 yr 1 hour ago, pm1961 said: Forgive the (maybe stupid) question.... My mb has two NICs..... so ithought I'd give pfsense in a VM a go and so I watched all the videos etc... But they all seem to deal with add in NIC cards rather than utilising what I already have.... My confusion is that, if I stub through my NICs to the VM, am I not denying the use of them to my bare metal server whilst it does its primary job of being my NAS? So, is it even possible to have a VM pfsense running as well as my server? If so, how do I arrange the two NICs? Thanks in advance If the NICs are in their own IOMMU groups you should be able to pass one but not the other.
January 22, 20206 yr Author Funnily enough..... I've just tried.... And they are in their own IOMMU groups ..... and they both stubbed "successfully" I say "successfully" because whilst they showed up in the VM edit and I was able to tick the boxes, pfsense couldn't detect both.... just em0..... em0 did show as "Link Up" when I connected either the WAN cable or the LAN cable, but I can't get pfsense to recognise both NICs. Sooooo.......... still baffled!
January 22, 20206 yr 13 minutes ago, pm1961 said: Funnily enough..... I've just tried.... And they are in their own IOMMU groups ..... and they both stubbed "successfully" I say "successfully" because whilst they showed up in the VM edit and I was able to tick the boxes, pfsense couldn't detect both.... just em0..... em0 did show as "Link Up" when I connected either the WAN cable or the LAN cable, but I can't get pfsense to recognise both NICs. Sooooo.......... still baffled! Unraid needs a nic. It sounds like you need 3 total for what you are trying to do.
January 22, 20206 yr Author Ah, my understanding was that I only needed two..... one for the WAN and one for the LAN....... so if I have three NICs on my server, might it look something like this...........? Unraid Switch Bare Metal _________ _____ | NIC 1 | ---------------------------> | 1 | | | | 2 | -------------------------> | | | 3 |--------------------------> | | | 4 | -------------------------> Various LAN devices | _pfVM | | 5 |--------------------------> WWW -----------------> | | NIC 2| | | 6 |--------------------------> | | | | | 7 | -------------------------> | | NIC 3| | --------------------------> | 8 | | ______ | ----------
January 23, 20206 yr Hi my configuration is similar. I've been using pfSense for about a year as a virtual machine on unRaid as my main router. Because I have two internet providers, in my case I have three network cards in total, two built-in the motherboard and one additional (external). In addition, unRaid also creates a virtual network card that is available to virtual machines and gives them access to the LAN (in my case it's called "br0") In my case an additional external card is used by unRaid as the main network card for LAN. Two cards from the motherboard are forwarded to pfSense and are used as WAN ports (in unRaid OS configuration they are blocked and "not available" for unRaid). For everything to work well in the pfSense configuration, this internal link br0 is also available as LAN. I hope you can see this on the image above. And this is how it looks in my case. I hope I helped a little. Regards Janusz
January 23, 20206 yr Author Brilliant, thanks for that! Pictures are worth a thousand words.... If I'm understanding correctly then, A "two NIC" MB will only work as a dedicated pfsense standalone machine unless you add more physical NICs? Cheers, Paul
January 23, 20206 yr Hi If you only need one WAN port, you only need two network adapters. One NIC1 you use for unRaid LAN and the other NIC2 you use for pfSense WAN. Just remember to select the virtual network adapter br0 for internal LAN in the main pfSense configuration. Regards Janusz
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