Hello,
So I bought from Ali Express, one of the N5105 fanless boxes - bare bones model then I got 32 gigs of RAM and a 1TB SSD from Amazon - total cost out the door less than $300.
I've installed ESXi as the booting OS, then I installed OPNSense in a VM, and I have it properly working and routing packets from the LAN to the WAN and that's great ... but what I want to do is configure three of the four ports to act like a switch where all three ports are on the LAN. Anyway, my issue seems to be either with ESXi and not understanding it fully, or it's an issue with my knowledge of OPNSense (which I've never used before until a couple of days ago) and not knowing how to properly configure bridging. So let me first explain how I have this set up so you have a good picture of my environment.
Within ESXi, I have FOUR vSwitches. Each vSwitch (0 - 3) is assigned to each port on the main board. However, since the Management network likes to default to being on vSwitch0, I assigned vmnic1 to vSwitch0 and vmnic0 to vSwitch1 ... so here are those assignments:
vSwitch0 - vmnic1
vSwitch1 - vmnic0
vSwitch2 - vmnic2
vSwitch3 - vmnic3
THEN, I have these Port Groups:
WAN - vSwitch1
LAN_1 - vSwitch0
LAN_2 - vSwitch2
LAN_3 - vSwitch3
Then, I created the virtual machine for OPNSense and I assigned it four NICs, which are each of the Port Groups, one per virtual NIC. I hard-coded the MAC addresses of the VMs virtual NICs so that the last octet was numbered sequentially which made it easier to connect which Port Group was which NIC inside OpnSense (the lowest number would be on port group WAN, and the highest would be on port group LAN_3 with the lowest numbered MAC address being vmnic0 and connected directly to the cable modem).
When I got OPNSense installed and did the manual assignment of network interfaces, I referenced the mac address that I assigned to each nic in the VM settings and was able to assign the proper port to the WAN interface in OPNSense, then the next mac address went to the LAN, then other two ended up being labeled as OPT1 and OPT2.
So far it seems fairly straightforward to me and all I should need to do at this point is pool the LAN interfaces into a bridge. But this is where I'm having problems.
For example, when I enable both OPT1 and OPT2 without giving them an IP address, then I go into Interfaces under Optional Types and create a bridge and assign those two interfaces to the bridge, then go into assignments and create a new interface that is assigned to the bridge, then I enable the new interface that I created, and give the bridge interface an IP address (on a different subnet for testing purposes only), then I connect a physical NIC from my laptop directly to either of those bridged ports, I cannot ping that interface to save my life.
I've tried everything I can think of and I even looked over and tried to implement this guide To no avail.
I'm somewhat at a loss here, because what I really need to do is have those three ports all on the LAN interface in OPNSense but I can't seem to make it work, and I'm hoping someone will have some insight for me to help me get this dialed in.
Thank you,
Mike
So I bought from Ali Express, one of the N5105 fanless boxes - bare bones model then I got 32 gigs of RAM and a 1TB SSD from Amazon - total cost out the door less than $300.
I've installed ESXi as the booting OS, then I installed OPNSense in a VM, and I have it properly working and routing packets from the LAN to the WAN and that's great ... but what I want to do is configure three of the four ports to act like a switch where all three ports are on the LAN. Anyway, my issue seems to be either with ESXi and not understanding it fully, or it's an issue with my knowledge of OPNSense (which I've never used before until a couple of days ago) and not knowing how to properly configure bridging. So let me first explain how I have this set up so you have a good picture of my environment.
Within ESXi, I have FOUR vSwitches. Each vSwitch (0 - 3) is assigned to each port on the main board. However, since the Management network likes to default to being on vSwitch0, I assigned vmnic1 to vSwitch0 and vmnic0 to vSwitch1 ... so here are those assignments:
vSwitch0 - vmnic1
vSwitch1 - vmnic0
vSwitch2 - vmnic2
vSwitch3 - vmnic3
THEN, I have these Port Groups:
WAN - vSwitch1
LAN_1 - vSwitch0
LAN_2 - vSwitch2
LAN_3 - vSwitch3
Then, I created the virtual machine for OPNSense and I assigned it four NICs, which are each of the Port Groups, one per virtual NIC. I hard-coded the MAC addresses of the VMs virtual NICs so that the last octet was numbered sequentially which made it easier to connect which Port Group was which NIC inside OpnSense (the lowest number would be on port group WAN, and the highest would be on port group LAN_3 with the lowest numbered MAC address being vmnic0 and connected directly to the cable modem).
When I got OPNSense installed and did the manual assignment of network interfaces, I referenced the mac address that I assigned to each nic in the VM settings and was able to assign the proper port to the WAN interface in OPNSense, then the next mac address went to the LAN, then other two ended up being labeled as OPT1 and OPT2.
So far it seems fairly straightforward to me and all I should need to do at this point is pool the LAN interfaces into a bridge. But this is where I'm having problems.
For example, when I enable both OPT1 and OPT2 without giving them an IP address, then I go into Interfaces under Optional Types and create a bridge and assign those two interfaces to the bridge, then go into assignments and create a new interface that is assigned to the bridge, then I enable the new interface that I created, and give the bridge interface an IP address (on a different subnet for testing purposes only), then I connect a physical NIC from my laptop directly to either of those bridged ports, I cannot ping that interface to save my life.
I've tried everything I can think of and I even looked over and tried to implement this guide To no avail.
I'm somewhat at a loss here, because what I really need to do is have those three ports all on the LAN interface in OPNSense but I can't seem to make it work, and I'm hoping someone will have some insight for me to help me get this dialed in.
Thank you,
Mike