Bridging Ethernet Ports in Virtualized Firewall on ESXI
I have a switch with a couple of 10GbE ports, but all are used.
I need 1 more 10GbE switch port.
Both my main TrueNAS box and the TrueNAS backup box are virtualized on vSphere ESXI and both have dual port Intel X550 10GbE adapters.
The main TrueNAS box is physically cabled to the network switch.
I want to install a virtual firewall, such as OPNsense or pfsense on the main TrueNAS box (in ESXI) and use the virtual firewall to bridge both physical ethernet ports on the X550 so that I can directly cable the backup TrueNAS box to the primary TrueNAS box and transfer data between both boxes and the physical network switch.
I would need both TrueNAS boxes to be able to communicate back to the physical switch. The backup TrueNAS box network traffic would traverse over the bridge on the primary TrueNAS box and then flow to the physical switch.
I've tried setting this up, but haven't had much luck. I've tried keeping it simple by keeping the network flat (192.168.0.x) and no VLANs, but lose connection as soon as I try to bring up the bridge.
Has anyone done something similar or have any suggestions on making this work? I'm also unclear as to how the vSwitches in ESXI should be set up. I've tried creating two separate vSwitches and putting them into promiscuity mode, but that doesn't seem to help either.
I have a switch with a couple of 10GbE ports, but all are used.
I need 1 more 10GbE switch port.
Both my main TrueNAS box and the TrueNAS backup box are virtualized on vSphere ESXI and both have dual port Intel X550 10GbE adapters.
The main TrueNAS box is physically cabled to the network switch.
I want to install a virtual firewall, such as OPNsense or pfsense on the main TrueNAS box (in ESXI) and use the virtual firewall to bridge both physical ethernet ports on the X550 so that I can directly cable the backup TrueNAS box to the primary TrueNAS box and transfer data between both boxes and the physical network switch.
I would need both TrueNAS boxes to be able to communicate back to the physical switch. The backup TrueNAS box network traffic would traverse over the bridge on the primary TrueNAS box and then flow to the physical switch.
I've tried setting this up, but haven't had much luck. I've tried keeping it simple by keeping the network flat (192.168.0.x) and no VLANs, but lose connection as soon as I try to bring up the bridge.
Has anyone done something similar or have any suggestions on making this work? I'm also unclear as to how the vSwitches in ESXI should be set up. I've tried creating two separate vSwitches and putting them into promiscuity mode, but that doesn't seem to help either.