Building Virtual Machine Labs: A Hands-On Guide by Tony Robinson

Author:Tony Robinson [Robinson, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2017-06-06T04:00:00+00:00

13.13 Creating the First VM, pfSense

pfSense is the keystone holding this entire configuration together. Personally, it's my favorite firewall distro due to ease of use, the amount of functionality it includes out of the box, combined with a plugin/add-on system for additional functionality. If you have the CPU, RAM, and disk, pfSense can easily be converted into a socalled “Next-Generation” firewall.

To start, make your way to https://www.pfsense.org/download/. Download the latest installation ISO for the amd64 architecture .Once you have downloaded the ISO, depending on what operating system you are using to manage your ESXi server, you may need to acquire a compression utility, as its maintainers distribute pfSense as an ISO image file compressed with gzip. This means that we’ll need to decompress the ISO file, using for example gunzip (Mac/Linux) or 7-Zip (Windows).

To make it available for use, we have to upload the decompressed installation image file to one of the datastores of our ESXi server. On the web interface, under the Navigator pane, click on Storage, and ensure the Datastores tab is selected. In the displayed list, right click on the datastore you wish to store the ISO on, then click Browse. In my case, I chose the datastore named “Rogue 2”.

In the Datastore browser window that appeared, click on the Create directory option. As we’re going to store all of our Linux and BSD ISOs in this directory, let’s name it

“Linux_and_BSD_ISOs”. Click the Create directory button.

Back in the Datastore browser, select the newly created directory, then click Upload in the upper left portion of the window.

This will open a file browser on your local machine. Navigate to where you downloaded the pfSense ISO. If you haven’t already, make sure that the ISO has been decompressed. After selecting the ISO file, the process of uploading it to the ESXi server’s datastore is started. On completion, you should be able to select the ISO file in the Datastore browser window to display its file statistics.

After successfully uploading the ISO file to the desired datastore, close the Datastore browser window.

13.14 Adding a New VM Now that we have the ISO ima ge to boot from ready, let’s create the VM for pfSense. On the ESXi web interface, click on Virtual Machines under the Navigator pane. This brings you to a list of currently registered VMs on the server. On your system, this list should be empty ; in my case, a virtual machine named BlindSeeker (my previously mentioned web server) is already available. Click on Create/Register VM to start the New virtual machine wizard.

On the first screen, select the option Create a new virtual machine, then click the Next button.

The next page asks to provide a name for the VM, and choose the family and the version of the OS that will be used later. Enter “pfSense” in the Name field, choose Other from the OS family drop-down, select FreeBSD (64-bit) as the OS version , then click Next.

The next section offers a list of datastores available on the ESXi host.

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